Sketching Trip 1) Heathrow to Acton Town
Although the Piccadilly Line goes out to Heathrow now, there was no airport when the District Railway first opened the line to Hounslow West, which was called Hounslow Barracks. In fact there were no airplanes either, since the line was built in 1884, decades before even the Wright Brothers’ first flight. It’s not my brief here to give a full history of the London Underground – far better people than me have already done that. However, briefly, the District Railway, as the Metropolitan District Railway, came into being in 1864, the year after the Metropolitan Railway ran the world’s first underground railway service from Farringdon to Paddington.
Although separate companies, originally the Metropolitan Railway and the District Railway worked fairly closely together, although this era of cooperation didn’t last. Although the District Railway was originally formed so that a complete circuit of inner London could be made – which eventually became the Circle Line – this was not actually accomplished until 1884, the same year that Hounslow Barracks station opened.
The Piccadilly Line originated as the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway, and opened in 1906, serving stations between Hammersmith and Finsbury Park. The railway was acquired by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, owners of several of the lines which would come to make up the Underground network.
In the early 1930s the UERL’s CEO, Frank Pick, decided on an expansion of the Piccadilly Line from Hammersmith to Hounslow and to Uxbridge, using the District Line’s tracks. Many of the stations on these two western arms of the line were rebuilt at this time, and many of those stations still remain.
The line was never extended past Uxbridge on the more northerly of the two arms, but during the 1970s the line reached west, as far as Heathrow airport, becoming the first subway or metro system in the world to have a station in an international airport. Which is I think, the cue for my sketching journey to begin.
I tend to feel a certain gratitude towards
the three stations at Heathrow. When
I was quite a young child we’d often venture as a family into the centre of the
city, and however good the day was, the inevitable end that all good things
come to would inevitably mean waiting on a cramped platform for three Rayners
Lane or Uxbridge trains to pass before our one service to Hounslow could come
along. This started to change when Hatton Cross opened, and completely changed
when the first Heathrow Station opened in 1977, as Heathrow Central. Today it’s
just one of 3 stations, and called Heathrow terminal 2 and 3. There are also
stations for Terminal 4 and Terminal 5.
To be honest, with their
underground ticket halls, and lack of surface buildings, the Heathrow stations
remind me very much of European metro stations. There’s no distinct station
buildings as such, they are just part of the huge terminal buildings. Very nice
if you like that sort of thing. Still, we must acknowledge that the original
Heathrow Station was, I believe the first metro station in the world within an
international airport. In fact, in my travels around Europe in the last few
years, the only other one I have thus far encountered is in Madrid. 
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