Gr
I grew up next door to LHR from the mid 50s, no doubt why I am on Pprune in the first place.
A few comments,
The road alongside the north side of LHR was the A4 Bath Road, a really major road back then-no M4 , the road along the eastern side was the A30 which goes all the way to Lands End . The roads joined/divided at a pub just to the North east of the airport called the Peggy Bedford, who Peggy Bedford was I have no idea. The dual carriageway onwards into London was called the Great West rd -A3. These roads are still there but are dotted with roundabouts and airport entrances and of course, are no longer trunk roads as such having been supplanted by the M4 and M3.
Northolt was I think still in BEA operation into the mid 1950s, one of my earlier memories was going to see where dad worked' at Northolt and climbing up the interior of a Dakota and Viking -ahhh tailwheels , or conventional undercarriage. This would have been 1955 because in mid 1955 I think BEA moved to LHR because we moved from Rickmansworth to Stanwell. Stanwell was almost still a very old and sleepy village (sadly it is a bit of a dump today) but the main element so f the old village are still there. I do not know how my father got from Rickmansworth to Northolt-no car, but although Stanwell literally adjoins LHR he worked in the central area and in the summer it was a push bike job until he got a car in about 1960. Stanwell was developing into something likre a northern company town' everyone except for a few elderly locals (who always called it Stannull) who worked at Heathrow. It still had a working blacksmith though and a high street with three pubs within 100 yeards.
The southern and especially S western side of the airport was virtually open countryside-security -whats that no fences, no guarded gates, cross the parallel rivers at the north end of the village and you were on the airport and occasionally people who had perhaps had a few too many in the Rising Sun Pub would get disoriented and wander too far onto the airport , no cargo centre then although the road bridge over the rivers had a security gate it was only to stop vehicles. Lots of rabbits foxes pheasants etc lived on the green 'meadows' that surrounded the few bits of concrete that came down to the SW corner
From 1955 on of course lHR grew and grew and grew, the central rea terminals T 3 or Oceanic being the last one, the extensions to the western end of both runways (known back then by their numbers as much as their orientation LHR of course had 6 originally but I can only ever remember seeing operations on five of them. The southern runway ( 10R 28L now ) was I think extended twice, firstly from block 79 to block 101 and then further west right to the western perimeter road.
Great views for my spotting days especially on a warm summers day with an easterly wind. On westerlies, things were not so good because there was no runway rotation and all landings were on the southern runway and all take offs (which seemed to comprise a pattern of -random aircraft -BEA Viscount random aircraft BEA viscount ad infinitum) were on the northern runway.
So excuse the memory dump but LHR was extremely interesting back then with all kinds of strange movements and a great variety of aircraft. It was also something of a social obstacle, the 'other side of the airport was long way away back in the 50s/60s not everyone had cars and the poor bus services meant there was nt a lot of interaction between the towns and villages, even two largely different spotting communities, the Cains Lane (now referred to as Myrtle Ave) group and the North LAP (as it was then) group.
Not always happy days but certainly happy memories and thanks for reviving them