Bedfont is a district within the London Borough of Hounslow in West London. It is 13 miles west-southwest of Charing Cross and two miles from Heathrow Airport. It contains the area that is informally referred to as North Feltham and the neighbourhood of Hatton.
Bedfont is described inside the Domesday Book as ‘Bedefunde’, which is thought to derive 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 5 was built, just a few miles north of Bedfont, archaeologists found Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman artefacts, suggesting that people had been residing in and around Bedfont over these eras.
The citizenry of Bedfont stood at 12,701 in the 2011 census. The number of inhabitants started to increase when Heathrow Airport was opened in 1946. This brought on escalating demand for local housing, particularly as the village of Heathrow was lost together with 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 back to the late 15th century. Fawns Manor is around the south side of the Green and dates from the sixteenth century, now belonging to the British Airways Housing Association.