Bedfont
Bedfont is a district inside the London Borough of Hounslow in West London. It's 21 km west-southwest of Charing Cross and 2 miles from Heathrow Airport. It includes the area that's informally referred to as North Feltham as well as the neighbourhood of Hatton.
Bedfont is described inside the Domesday Book as ‘Bedefunde’, which is believed to originate from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘Bedfunta’, which means ‘bed’s spring’. It states that the manors of Bedfont, Hatton and Stanmore were all held by William Fitz Other. Before Heathrow’s Terminal 5 was built, just a couple of miles north of Bedfont, archaeologists found Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman artefacts, suggesting that people had been living 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 rising demand for local housing, especially as the village of Heathrow was lost in addition to part 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 around the south side of the Green and dates from the sixteenth century, now belonging to the British Airways Housing Association.
