Feltham

Fritz Lang's Metropolis sponsored by Adidas

Map

Legend has it that Audrey Hepburn used to go on holiday in Feltham. Nowadays Feltham is little more than a concrete skidmark on the underpants of Hounslow. Still, in Feltham, you will find several fine examples of the following basic shapes:

• Cubes
• Cuboids
• Right angles
• Rectangles
• Squares
• Boxes
• Quadrilaterals
• White Fiats

Several buildings dominate the Feltham skyline (above), but the most noticeable is the giantic purple one, illuminated with apparently the same lights used in nightclub toilets to prevent cocaine abuse. This is actually the St Giles' Hotel, a hotel which has somehow wandered off from its friends in Heathrow Airport and got lost.

There are a number of shops available in Feltham, such as the unpronounceable Scandinavian discount chain LidL, popular with residents of Richmond for its stocks of Lithuanian rice and Slovenian tomatoes for 4p/kg. Fans of historical bank shop fronts will find an Abbey National that has escaped two rebranding exercises. If you are in need of lacy knickers, they can be purchased from Tesco for £5.

The local pub lives in a concrete box with a wood fascia. It's a JD Wetherspoons, called "The Moon On The Square". It looks slightly like a Borg rabbit hutch, and the pavement outside has a faint smell of vinegary sick.

Poor old Feltham though. It's doing its best, considering there's a ruddy great airport two miles northwest. The station was revamped as an airport interchange in the days South West Trains spent money on the stations. The signs advertise the fact that there is a super-ultra airport link outside the station.

But there's lots to see here apart from the bus terminal, such as the cafe where apparently somebody was so hungry that they bit the head off the cardboard sign outside. And the chemist that displays the sign "ONLY TWO TEENAGERS AT ONCE". And the genuine ultra-mini trailer park just by the station car park. It is easily identifiable by the five-bar gate and the handwritten sign "RETREAT". Whether this is the name of the establishment or a command is unclear.

Feltham, of course, is most famous for its Young Offenders' Institution. It's actually just next door to the railway line about a mile out of the station towards the equally delightful suburb of Ashford. This gives the delighted inmates yet another way of topping themselves. No signposts give directions from the station, but there are plenty of signs to the local leisure centre Feltham Airparcs, a building that is pretty indistinguishable from a prison in any case.

The only real example of salubriousness in this area is the plush BP Sunbury bus that leaves from just outside Platform 2 of the station. This ferries graduate management consultants to the HQ of said multinational chemical company. The windows of the bus are opaque, and display holograms of Exeter, Durham and Cambridge so the poor things are not distressed by anything they might see outside.

Statistics

Time to Zone 1 40min on South West Trains (Vauxhall)
Last trains to Zone 1 Early. Mon-Sat 2315, Sun 2323 (later than Mon-Sat, perversely)

What to do if you are stuck in Feltham after the last train to Zone 1

There may still be buses running to parts of Hounslow, but take the N285 to Heathrow from the one well-lit part of Feltham, outside the station, and work from there; there might still be a tube from Hatton Cross to where you want to go, and there will be a bus to Zone 1 from the airport bus station. Don't stay in Feltham. No, really don't.