West Drayton
Dingy brown-sodden industrial estate with added bonus shops
Leave the windswept, noisy, grotty platform and enter the wonderful world of brown. Two worlds, in fact: the railway divides the unforgivably ugly Yiewsley to the north and, underneath a grimy dark road bridge, the unremarkable West Drayton to the south.
Yiewsley first. Even the name sounds like a brand of sick bag. Head up round the corner, over the river (more on which later), and past the appropriately named Brown's tanning salon. Yiewsley high street is mainly composed of chipboarded offices, fast-food shops selling chips that taste like UHT milk and burgers from reformed murder victims, and pound stores.
Astonishing, incredible things sold in the GASP!! discount store, Yiewsley:
- Deflated footballs
- Plastic wolves
- 22 "pop magnets" for 50p
- 3 Choc Dips for £1
One interesting place nearby is called Little Britain. To get there, follow one of the sideroads to the river; you'll pass several different flavours of industrial estate, mainly populated by the kind of loss-making firms run by serial sexual harrassers. You might also see a burnt-down garden centre containing scrap metal, and a big warehouse called "Shark's". Initially it looks like a plastic chair superstore, but on closer inspection it turns out to be a crèche. Oddly, it plagiarises the logo from the discontinued energy alcopop Shark.
Disappointingly, no Matt Lucas can be seen in Little Britain. Just a completely deserted riverside restaurant that optimistically advises customers to "book ahead" and an endearingly strange set of humpback bridges at right-angles to one another.
It's at this point you get to farmland, organic smells, and feel compelled to turn back, although further downstream, the River Colne does display reassuring signs of urbanity by containing a burnt-out boat, a barge full of builders' sand, a floating machine cog and an empty packet of frozen broccoli.
Residents of Zone 6, #6 – West Drayton
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Looking into an estate agent's window, saying "Where's Robin? Where's Robin?" and getting increasingly agitated. Not being helped by the fact that the estate agent is closed. |
West Drayton now. West Drayton is principally famous for its air traffic control centre, which has the computer that keeps breaking down because somebody keeps trying to play Horace Goes Skiing on it and it runs out of memory.
Go further down the street and you'll see more and more boarded up and broken shops, until the junction at the end. Here the top floors of the row of shops don't quite join flush with the ground floors, giving the unnerving sensation of a space-time rupture.
Another feature of West Drayton, apart from the racist remarks being yelled at by Fiat drivers at passing children, is the dodgy "strip bar" next to the station, under the bridge. It's difficult to say whether it's open or derelict (like most things around here), but after it's been raining, and if the light falls on it in a particular way, you can see something very interesting. The chalkboard outside used to have a distinct drawing of a female outline, but with the words: "HOSTED BY DRAG QUEEN".
Buses sidle past quite regularly for a place called Stockley Park; in fact, this place is trailed very regularly over the on-train displays. Do not be fooled into thinking that this is a verdant Eden full of cheeky squirrels and laughing children. It's a grey forest of call centres. Stockly Park so depressing that planes landing at Heathrow avoid flying over it, lest they be sucked down like spiders into a plughole.
As previously mentioned, West Drayton station is on the dirty side. Until quite recently, this was most obvious from the walkway under the tracks to the platforms. But happily, there is now a nice white corrugated iron wall between the commuters and the rats, sludge and bones:
Trains scream past frequently and drown out most announcements. The westbound platform is completely exposed to the slipstream, though there is a waiting room, which in a stroke of genius incorporates the exit. There are three entrances to the station: the main one, the back one, which leads into somebody's garage, and the night entrance, which opens at 6pm when both the other entrances shut, because night begins at 6pm in West Drayton.
From the train map, you might conclude that West Drayton is in the middle of absolutely nowhere. You'd be right. But it is only about fifteen minutes' or two miles' drive north to Uxbridge or south to Heathrow.
For the record, there's no such place as Drayton for West Drayton to be west of. 'West' must therefore signify something different, such as 'leave immediately'.
Statistics
Time to Zone 1 23mins on FGW Link (Paddington)
Last trains to Zone 1 Mon-Fri 0042, Sat 0032, Sun 2357
What to do if you get stuck in West Drayton before the last train to Zone 1
Depending on the time and if it's Tuesday to Saturday night, you might catch the zombie shift train at about 2am or 3am; although you'll probably have to guess which one of three platforms it will stop at. If you guess wrong, or you've wound up there at the wrong time, get a minicab to Uxbridge or Hillingdon and work from there. Minicabs might, or might not, be available outside the station, depending on how many of the drivers died of despair in Yiewsley that night.
