Some great memories here....
As someone who grew up in Hounslow (underneath 28R) and later lived in Harlington and Sipson I also have lots of memeories... here are a few (which seem difficult to believe in today's security driven world)
I remember the first BOAC 747 at LHR (G-AWNA??) .... it and a couple of others were parked on the North side but could be easily accessed from a service road off of the Bath Road. I went there one evening with my dad (1969?) and we just parked up and calmly walked around the "sound baffle wall" and explored the undercarriage of this unbelievable aircraft. No one seemed in the slightest bothered by us being there!
In the early 70s I would get the 82 bus from Hounslow garage to LHR, and with other urchins would go around the terminals collecting anything that was free.... timetables luggage labels etc (in fact I have just bought the 1970 ESSO guide to London Airport from Ebay... I used to get one a week in those days!).... but most of all sugar cubes from the cafés, we would then go to the edge of the balcony in T1 and drop them onto the heads of the poor sods siting in the public phone areas on the lower floor (sorry if I ever got you)
In the mid 70s everyone my age had a sports moped (FS1Es, AP50s etc). The airport tunnel (the smaller bike/pedestrian one) was the favored place for seeing how fast your bike could go... the gentle slope down and no wind allowed us Fizzie boys to see 50mph on the clock. Most evenings you could see boy racers whizzing through, chin on the tank!
I particularly remember one evening in the early 80s in the White Hart (Harlington). A girl I was with knew I was interested in aircraft and asked if i would like to sit in the cockpit of Concorde. A call was duly made and after the pubs shut we headed off for TB J (i think). It turned out her mate's husband was the foreman electrician on the night shift , and for small donation to their tea swindle you could get a guided tour of anything in the hangar that night (and for me that was 747s and Concorde). The ground systems were all powered up and I had great fun whizzing back and forth in the the electrically powered captain's seat. There were several other parties also going around... they had quit a little thing going!!
Other memories include seeing the plume of smoke from our back garden when the BOAC 707 lost an engine and caught fire ('67?).... and returning from Pirbright range as an ATC cadet and being caught in the Sunday afternoon traffic at the Crooked Billett on the A30 when Papa India crashed.
In later years, racing a guy in an MGB off the lights at Hatton Cross and in th ensuing burn up around the perimeter road the MGB spun and rolled on the very sharp bend on the Northern Perimeter road and he had to be rescued by a transit full of BA workers who lifted the car up for him to crawl out, and the Pan Am maintenance base on the south side that always had a 727 parked there...
Sadly it just not the same over there anymore....