A night out, once you leave the perimeter road

Hounslow has a high street that is still moving at ten and does South Asian food better than most of central London. Hounslow Central station is on the Piccadilly line and the central terminals are twelve to fifteen minutes west of it, which makes the town the most practical night out within reach of this airport by a considerable margin.

Michelle will pick somewhere before she leaves, walk you there in under a quarter of an hour and order more than you meant to eat. Cindy is equally at home there and arrives dressed for somewhere better than the car park she has just crossed.

The White Horse at Longford is a proper old building with low beams, a garden and aircraft crossing overhead on their way in, five minutes by car from Terminal 5. The Ostrich Inn at Colnbrook is older still and makes the business parks behind it look like scaffolding. On the northern side the Three Magpies sits on the Bath Road with the runway immediately behind the fence.

None of these is a late night. They are the first hour of an evening rather than the last, and all three need daylight to be worth the trip. Molly will suggest starting at the White Horse and walking back, and Milena will take twenty minutes at the fence line before the light goes.

From the central terminals the Elizabeth line reaches Bond Street without a change, and from Hayes and Harlington it is a little under twenty minutes to Paddington. An evening in town is genuinely possible from this airport, and the return leg on a nearly empty carriage is one of the better parts of it.

The timetable is the thing to get right. On Friday and Saturday the Piccadilly line runs through the night as far as Terminal 5. On every other night the last one goes around half past midnight, and Terminal 4 closes earlier than that every night of the week. Plan the end of the evening before you plan the start of it.

Longer than a hotel call, because two journeys are now inside the booked hours instead of one. Three hours at the airport barely covers a table and a car each way. Five is comfortable. If the evening involves a train into town, treat it as most of a night rather than part of one.

The desk will do that arithmetic with you rather than take the booking and hope. If the hours are tight, the honest answer is usually the room, and the formats on hotel room visits are the ones to read. Losing an evening is better than buying half of one, and this desk would rather tell you that on the first message than at the door. What the terms are if you do have to stand it down is on booking.

Michelle and Sonya both treat Hounslow as home ground, and Sonya likes twenty minutes in Lampton Park before dinner when there is light for it. Luna is better at eleven than at seven and entirely at home in a bar where nobody looks up. Molly finds the western villages funny rather than bleak and is the easiest company for a guest who has been serious all day.

Between the toned and curvaceous profiles and the Hounslow names there is a working list of six or seven for any given night. Ask the desk who is actually free rather than settling on one.