Bedfont
Bedfont is a district within the London Borough of Hounslow in West London. It's 13 miles west-southwest of Charing Cross and 2 miles from Heathrow Airport. It contains the area which is informally referred to as North Feltham and the neighbourhood of Hatton.
Bedfont is referenced inside the Domesday Book as ‘Bedefunde’, which is believed to come from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘Bedfunta’, which means ‘bed’s spring’. It states that the manors of Bedfont, Hatton and Stanmore had been all held by William Fitz Other. Just before Heathrow’s Terminal Five was built, just a few miles north of Bedfont, archaeologists discovered Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman artefacts, suggesting that people had been residing in and around Bedfont over these periods.
The populace of Bedfont stood at 12,701 in the 2011 census. The number of inhabitants began to rise when Heathrow Airport was opened in 1946. This caused increasing demand for local housing, particularly as the village of Heathrow was lost and also some of the Hamlet of Hatton.
Bedfont has two surviving manor houses: Pates Manor, once owned by the Page family, and Fawns Manor. Pates Manor is behind the Church of St Mary the Virgin and dates from the late fifteenth century. Fawns Manor is on the south side of the Green and dates back to the sixteenth century, now belonging to the British Airways Housing Association.
