Companions for UB7: the Stockley Road hotels and the Elizabeth line at West Drayton

A town that works office hours

The middle of West Drayton is small and perfectly ordinary: a station, a green, a row of shops, a few pubs. What gives the place its shape is everything around it. Stockley Park to the south is offices and landscaping and a golf course, busy until six and deserted by seven. The Grand Union Canal runs through on the western side, which is the one genuinely pleasant walk available and takes twenty minutes if you follow it properly.

Nobody comes to UB7 for the nightlife and this page is not going to invent any. What the town offers is a station with a fast, frequent line into London, a short run south to the terminals, and hotels that are easier to reach and quieter to stay in than the ones on the airport perimeter.

Where the rooms sit

The hotel on Stockley Road is the largest of them, on the road that links the town to the A4 and the airport. The one on Cherry Lane is the other inside the town proper, a few minutes west of the station. The one on Sipson Road at Sipson is technically the next village along, five minutes south, and takes a good share of the bookings on this page.

All three are named because guests stay in them. There is no arrangement with any hotel here, nobody at a desk is told that a companion is coming, and she walks in as somebody meeting you for the evening.

Three minutes to the platform, ten to the airport

West Drayton station is three minutes from the middle of town on the Elizabeth line, which is the best thing about the postcode. Paddington is roughly half an hour and Slough about eight minutes in the other direction. Iver, the next stop west, is about thirty minutes on foot and should be treated as a car journey.

By road, Terminals 2 and 3 are about ten minutes south and Terminal 5 around fifteen, junction 4 of the M4 is five, and Colnbrook is a quarter of an hour west across the motorway. Evenings that involve the terminals take three hours as a minimum with the travel counted in, the same floor as everywhere else near the airport.

What guests here are usually after

Two groups write to the desk from UB7. The first are working at Stockley Park for a week and have hit the point where a hotel bar on its own has stopped being enough. The second are flying out in the morning and chose a room here rather than on the Bath Road because it is quieter and the airport is still ten minutes away.

Both want the same thing, which is an unhurried evening with no logistics attached. Two hours covers a drink and dinner if you stay in the hotel; three is the sensible length if anything involves the airport or a table somewhere else. Her fee is handed to her in person when she arrives, and it is the figure Etta wrote down in advance.

Companions who cover UB7

Sonya is the West Drayton regular, athletic, early thirties, and thoroughly used to a town that empties at six. She is twenty minutes out on the Elizabeth line and covers the Heathrow hotels inside a quarter of an hour.

Around her, Tiffany comes from the old village at Harmondsworth, Vanessa from the Bath Road end of Longford, and Milena, Nora and Stacy all work the terminals a short run south. Laura will come east from Langley in about twelve minutes when the evening is staying in a hotel.

The neighbours, five to fifteen minutes out

Harmondsworth is five minutes south, a village the airport somehow failed to swallow. Longford is a little further down the same road, beside the Terminal 5 fence. The terminals themselves are ten to fifteen minutes depending which one you want. West across the motorway, Langley is twelve minutes and back in Berkshire.