RAF Heston

Heston aerodrome, just west of London at Hounslow in Middlesex, opened in 1929 as a private and commercial airfield — notable for its early concrete hangar and a smart passenger terminal — and earned a place in history in September 1938 when Neville Chamberlain flew from here to meet Hitler and returned with the Munich Agreement. In the months before the war it became the base for Sidney Cotton’s pioneering clandestine photographic reconnaissance flights over Germany, work that grew into No. 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit. Through the war Heston was home to a succession of fighter and training units, including a number of the Polish squadrons, flying Spitfires, Hurricanes and later Mosquitoes, and was used by American transport and ferrying squadrons. It was bombed during the Battle of Britain. The grass field proved too cramped for postwar aviation and closed in the late 1940s; the M4 motorway and Heston services were later built across part of the site, though one of the original 1929 hangars survives as a listed building.