Heathrow Airport is a huge tract of land. Thousands of acres, hundreds of buildings, and vast open spaces for the manouvering of aircraft. It sits, unusually for an airport of such size, nestled in among residential communities, having expanded to fill the space it now occupies from a small aerodrome in a field fifty years ago. The edges of it are ragged in places, and rigidly well-defined in others. A walk around the perimeter reveals as much about the airport and the way it interacts with the world as it does about our own attitudes to space and transport.

If undertaking a walk around Heathrow, allow at least four hours. Be prepared to walk where there is no pavement, and where you are patentely unwelcome. For ease of use, consult this map.

1. Hatton Cross

Of the millions of people who enter and exit Heathrow each year the vast majority do so within vehicles: planes, busses, cars and trains. Although Terminals 4 and 5 both sit on the perimeter road of the airport, exiting from them onto the road is a deliberately difficult task. Hatton Cross Bus and Tube station represents a more user-friendly starting point for a circuit of Heathrow Airport. From it you can exit onto Great South-West Road.

With your back to the station look right. The pavement soon disappears, becoming a dusty verge directly alongside the fence which surrounds Heathrow proper. To your left the path is wide, smooth, inviting. Go left. You are still a stranger in this unwelcoming environment.

2. Great South-West Road

There is life here. Horse chestnut trees. Hawthorns. Rosehips. Elderflower. Oak. In places the old trees bow over the paths, low branches turning the pavement into a shadowy tunnel. The outer fence is approximate and often broken. On the other side of it you see the vast bulk of huge square buildings. One vast cube is surmounted by the British Airways logo. What could possibly be served by such a hulking and windowless structure?

The entrance to Eastern Perimeter Road is marked by a sign which seems on first reading to prohibit entry. Closer inspection reveals that it does not – merely assures the reader that the right to be present may be revoked at any moment.

3. Chaucer Avenue

An ordinary suburban London street. Residents weed their driveways. Wash their cars. A thin crowd of mothers strolls towards the Primary School on the corner. No sound except for a car engine left running in a driveway, the bonnet raised. A crumpled energy drink can being blown across the road.

Then, a steadily increasing roar. Loud and low enough to make the ground vibrate. Bass, all-consuming. Urgent in its pitch, which grows to a scream before the plane eclipses into view. The metal belly feels close enough to touch. The world shudders. Nobody so much as glances skywards.

4. Berkeley Avenue meets Bath Road

The buildings on either side of the junction are close to a hundred years old. Modelled after French chateaus, complete with fanciful pointed turrets. For a time one of these was the Jarvis International Hotel, and before that a public house belonging to the Berkeley family, whose coat of arms still appears over the main entrance.

Now these are a mix of private residences and quotidian businesses. A chemist, a barber, a dentist, a grocer. The small antique structures appear ludicrously small beside the glass and concrete hotels which have sprung up next door.

5. The Moxy

Parking is a concern which dominates the landscape north of Heathrow. It is not for nothing that a BAA map once referred to the village of Harlington in its entirety as “Parking Zone 6”. Here, outside the Moxy hotel, we get our first taste of the tensions inherent in parking millions of vehicles each year.

Note also the caravan in the courtyard. A quaint, quirky outside bar and seating area, used by the patrons of the hotel during summer months. Not so very far away, people live in caravans situated on a patch of waste ground in order to defend their land against the expansion of the airport.

6. Bath Road

Huge parking garages. Empty swathes of land fenced off and run to seed. Vast hotels. A bowling alley. Even a brand new hotel under construction. The builders seem to know that – if the airport expands as planned – the fruits of their labour will be short-lived. They are laconic as they go about their work.

Two houses stand alone, neat and defiant. They look older than the airport which forms their backdrop. The gardens are immaculate. The curtains tied back. The plaques beside the door impeccably painted. There can be no doubt at all that they are occupied. This is a statement. This is what resistance looks like.

7. The Three Magpies

In 1765 this public house was known by a different name: “The Three Pigeons”. It stood on a rural road, surrounded by fields. By 1830 up to fifty stage coaches and four mail coaches each day passed by, making it one of the busiest thoroughfares in the UK. Its relative isolation made it a popular spot for highwaymen and robbers.

The other coaching inns which might have surrounded The Three Magpies have been replaced by vast, glassy hotels. They offer easy access, online booking, secure locks. Clean rooms, freshly-laundered sheers, air conditioning. A level of certainty and luxury which would have been unimaginable to an anxious nineteenth-century traveller.

8. The Tunnel

For many, spilling off the M4, the tunnel marks the boundary of Heathrow. Endlessly long, it dives underneath the runway and emerges near Terminals 2 and 3. When first constructed, it was two lanes wide, with the other two being dedicated to pedestrian access. Now it is solely for motor vehicles, a black mouth that swallows in a thousand of them each hour.

On the roundabout to the east of the tunnel is a small plaque, almost obscured by a discarded road sign. It marks the spot where the triangulation of the UK began – a superhuman effort of organisation and will. It is not recorded on Google maps, although the model of Airbus380 which surmounts the roundabout in front of the tunnel is labelled as a monument.

9. Northern Perimeter Road West

As you walk the perimeter notice that the planes are coming into land ahead of you, then beside you – kissing earth in a cloud of white smoke not two hundred metres from the fence. Then they are landing behind you, deaccelerating by the time they overtake. Then they are gathering speed. Then they are taking off ahead of you, beside you, behind you.

By the fence: a squashed pear, perhaps discarded by a passing driver. Many, many years ago one of the prime uses of this land was for the growing of fruit.

10. Western Perimeter Road

A small village of satellite buildings. These have nothing to do with takings off and landings, with maintenance, with fuelling. These are here to serve the humans. The Heathrow Community Relations building is surprisingly large. It is built on land forcibly taken from the farmers and villagers who used to live here in the 1930s.

The pod cars travel on raised roads. For the most part they are invisible to you – intended for a different kind of person with a different kind of purpose. As if to underline their superiority the pavement disappears. You must walk on the verge, buffeted by the wind of passing coaches, courtesy cars, taxis, lorries, busses.

11. Terminal Five

Narrow, confusing roads. At first it seems impossible to access the terminal from here. Ask a passing staff member and they will shake their head. Can’t be done. They say. You’ll have to catch a taxi if you want to access the terminal. It’s against the law. But carry on. Follow the pavement as it curves around and you will find yourself, quite suddenly, in the smoking area outside T5.

Note the change in texture of the air around you. The noise, the temperature, the closeness of people. Note how you go from being obtrusive when walking along the path used only by staff members and taxi drivers, to utterly invisible as you enter the terminal proper, lost in chattering, urgent, noisy crowd.

12. Western Perimeter Road

Join a long train of staff members leaving work, heading home on foot. It is natural that the people who live near the airport work at the airport. The path is very clean and neat, but still there is evidence of the human. A collection of cigarettes and a cigarette packed caught in the bushes.

As you approach the roundabout, planes screech by directly overhead as they leap up into the sky. Their wheels fold away above your head, smooth and effortless. It looks like a process which requires very little mechanical effort.

13. Southern Perimeter Road

Through the thick screen of bushes you see a church spire and a golden-yellow field. The barrier between the road and this landscape is more permeable than the fence which guards the airport. You pass a garage. Scent of oil and diesel. £2.50 sandwiches. A fallen flag promoting premium unleaded. On the other side of the road a lone planespotter leans against the traffic barrier taking sight through binoculars.

Further on, houses and a pub. A river with ducks. A children’s playground. You expected a softer border. For the airportiness of the airport to seep out into the world and be visible in the landscape for miles around. It is not. Turn your back on it and cover your ears and you might not know it was there. Walls are walls. Those who live adjacent to them go about their lives like anyone else.

14. Duke of Northumberland’s River

A narrow concrete footbridge allows access to the small ridge of land between two tongues of river. It is densely grassy and oddly quiet. Trees growing. Grass growing. Ducks turning tail-up in the water and scrabbling around, as though unaware entirely that the airport is nearby. A swan as white and clean as the belly of a plane.

From here, through the trees, you can see Gate Gourmet. Endless delicate, compartmentalised meals being prepared, stocked, stacked, ready to fly. And the Animal Reception Centre. To an animal what must this place be? An inexplicable torrent of sensations. Isolation. Terror. All in aid of a process they do not understand in the least.

15. Terminal 4

The route into T4 is easier to find than that into T5, but it feels oddly as though it was not built for humans. The ground is slanted, and the road passes by so close overhead that you have to duck. The pavement presents trip hazards outlined in chipped yellow paint. A narrow swathe of path is painted green. This is the route you are supposed to walk.

Again the noise. The activity. How quickly you’re lost in it. How dense it is. How stressed the people. How intense their lives. Boards rattle with departing flights. Ever plane you have seen take off and land and pass by overhead has been of incredible importance to hundreds of conscious souls.

16. Southern Perimeter Road

As you approach the end of the circuit, the pavement gives out. You walk alongside the fence, on a dusty scrap of land comprised of a scrabble of roots and gravel. Dried husks of banana skins thrown from cars. On one side, traffic. On the other, separated only by a thin layer of wire, planes perform slow acrobatics around one another. You do not touch the fence. It is not electrified, but the airport makes it feel as though it would be.

*

Krishan Coupland is a graduate from the University of East Anglia MA Creative Writing programme. His debut chapbook When You Lived Inside The Walls is available from Stonewood Press, and his short fiction appears in Ambit, Aesthetica and Litro. He has won the Manchester Fiction Prize, and the Bare Fiction Prize. He runs and edits Neon Literary Magazine. He is unduly pre-occupied with theme parks. His website is www.krishancoupland.co.uk.