Giveaways
First published in 2022, and since updated.
BOTH MYSELF, in 2002, and my friend Chris more recently, ended up quite by accident in the same village of Colnbrook after lengthy flights to Britain from New Zealand.
Here’s a map which shows the location of Colnbrook in relation to downtown London and neighbouring towns like Slough and Windsor. Colnbrook is indicated by an orange pin, as it is really only a village and doesn’t show up at that scale.
Though it is only about 5 km from Heathrow Airport’s busy international Terminal 5, and 27 km or 17 miles from the very centre of London, Colnbrook is located in a reserved green belt area between London and Slough, and so, it feels very rural. It also has a historic and picturesque old-town area, granted its town charter by Henry VIII. Quite a few of the buildings seem to date back to that era, if not to earlier times, such as the Ostrich Inn, a pub-hotel in business since 1106 and where you can still stay today, though nowadays they’ve got TV and wifi of course.
Colnbrook used to be an important stagecoach stop on the way between London and Bath, and the road through the older part of town is historically known as the Old Bath Road.
Many of the buildings in the village have big archways leading to a courtyard behind, where the coaches would be driven to rest the horses for the night (it was probably dangerous to be on the roads at night in those days anyway, what the likes of the highwayman Dick Turpin about).
You can see one of those archways in the next photo, of another mediaeval building in Colnbrook called King John’s Palace.
King John’s Palace was built on a spot where King John camped on his way to Runnymede to sign the Magna Carta. On the same journey, King John is also supposed to have stopped in at the Ostrich, which was probably the only big building for miles around at the time, for a pint.
Many historical events have happened in Colnbrook, such as the meeting of the conspirators against Henry IV in 1400, a meeting that features in Shakespeare’s play Richard II.
Thereafter, Queen Elizabeth I stayed in King John’s Palace, which began its days as a mediaeval manor, on one of her royal tours. And the apple known as Cox’s Orange was bred in the same manor’s orchard.
And in 1642, a petition for peace in the worsening English Civil War was presented to King Charles I in Colnbrook, though it seems Charles I never did pay much heed to sensible advice.
There are apparently thirty-six listed historic buildings in and around Colnbrook.
Coming back to the town’s longstanding hospitality trade, it also includes the Royal Standard, which looks straight out of The Lord of the Rings, though its pub conversion is comparatively recent (1886), plus the Golden Cross, and the Olde George.
For a tiny village, Colnbrook appears to have no shortage of pubs.
Leaving New Zealand was pretty awful. We both transited through the USA after long flights, through Houston in Chris’s case and San Francisco in mine, only to pile onto another long flight to Heathrow, where on Chris’s flight it seemed to take the best part of two hours for the baggage to be unloaded.
Chris then endured another wait of an hour at Heathrow’s really dingy bus terminal for twice-each-hour Hotel Hoppa Route H5H bus, which would have cost six and a half pounds but failed to show up twice in a row, after which he got a taxi for 30 pounds to his hotel, the B&B London Heathrow, which turned out to be in Colnbrook.
The B&B London Heathrow was known as the Arora Park Hotel until 2024, and was refurbished when it changed hands, so it has a new feel. It is affordable, always has someone on the desk, has nice breakfasts, and the Hotel Hoppa Route H5H also pulls off the street into its forecourt every half an hour, when it runs. Plus, checkout is at midday, which is a bonus for anyone who wants to sleep in after a long flight. (Nobody paid us for that review; it is purely off the cuff.)
Having said all that, you are probably less likely to encounter a ghost at the B&B than in one or two of the other places, as its building looks modern by Colnbrook standards, only dating back to the days of Jane Austen or thereabouts.
On my earlier trip, I spent the night in a very nice Airbnb above an Italian restaurant.
There is only one drawback, the fact that the noisy jets of Heathrow scream overhead, as you can hear in my walkaround video:
As I mentioned above, part of the reason that the village is so rustic is that it is in the London Green Belt, which surrounds most of London and separates it from newer suburban areas such as Slough, which lies just west of Colnbrook. There are towns and villages in the Green Belt, including Slough, but they aren’t allowed to be joined up by suburban sprawl.
The part of the green belt in which Colnebrook sits is an especially pristine area called the Colne Valley Regional Park. The website of the Colne Valley Regional Park says that the area is a “mosaic of farmland, woodland & water with 200 km of rivers, canals and over 60 lakes.” And so, along with old villages, the Colne Valley is full of rustic scenes like this one even though it is not that far from London.
Here’s a video about England’s fourteen green belts, from the Council to Protect Rural England:
Along with towns and villages that are prevented from merging together, and nature parks in the strictest sense, the green belts also contain lots of working farms. And so, the village of Colnbrook and its surroundings maintain an old-timey farming tradition even though they are practically in the suburbs of London.
Wandering around the village, I came across a big farm called Poyle Park Farm, which has a very historic listed farmhouse and which, though managed by a local family from the village, seemed to be owned by none other than the Queen herself.
Colnbrook is close to Windsor, and the Royal Family owns many farms in the area, known as the Royal Farms.
There was no way, even after wandering for some time, that I could get across this land, which was a bit inconvenient.
I thought that as I was in the suburbs, I could pretty much go anywhere, and having to go around working farms came as a surprise. But that is how the Green Belt is organised, a sort of balancing act of the three interests of townsfolk, nature, and farmers.
Anyhow, the fact that there were such things as Royal Farms was my first introduction to Britain’s class-based society on this trip, and one that didn’t take long.
I remember seeing a documentary in which Prince Philip was pottering about on his farms; it was nice to see that he was concerned for the environment. You can buy some of the produce from the Royal Farms, though I suspect the best of it is kept for Buckingham Palace.
In fact, the monarchy owns a surprisingly large amount of the best land all over Great Britain, a Crown Estate apparently worth £16 billion. Not just the Royal Farms, which are almost a hobby these days, I suspect, but also many urban and suburban areas that yield more in the way of cold cash, along with various other rural properties as far afield as Scotland. Having said that, the 1.4% of England, at least, that the Royals are estimated to own is greatly outweighed, in terms of area, by the rest of the aristocracy and the landed gentry in general.
In any case, it was remarkable that somewhere as old-fashioned as Colnbrook could exist right next to Heathrow Airport.
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