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A fact from Heathrow (hamlet) appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 15 May 2011 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Sherwood, Philip. (2006) Around Heathrow Past & Present. Sutton Publishing ISBN0-7509-4135-9 (contains many pairs of photographs, old (or in one case a painting), and new, each pair made from the same viewpoint.)
Sherwood, Philip. (2009) Heathrow: 2000 Years of History. Stroud: The History Press ISBN978-0-7524-5086-2 Parameter error in {{ISBN}}: checksum
Sherwood, Philip. (2012) Around Heathrow Through Time. Amberley Publishing, ISBN978-1-4456-0846-4
This article is substantially duplicated by a piece in an external publication. Since the external publication copied Wikipedia rather than the reverse, please do not flag this article as a copyright violation of the following source:
As this article currently stands, there is far too much detail for what is a (former) hamlet of little significance. It reads like a community history project in which every single bit of information that can be found has been included, with no bar for notability - WP:NOTEVERYTHING says "Information should not be included in this encyclopedia solely because it is true or useful." I cannot think of why Wikipedia should record that a former resident was "Patrick Howell, market gardener. an area on the east side of Heathrow Road, including King's Arbour, where he grew rhubarb under the trees". On top of this, very little of this information is referenced. I tried to remove a lot of this detail, but the editing was undone and so I wanted to start the discussion. Ilikeeatingwaffles (talk) 08:28, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I can't argue that the detail is not excessive as judged by the Wikipedia policy. But I must say I found it a very interesting read, particularly when you consider that more or less everything referred to has been absolutely obliterated by the airport. I would hope that the editor who put in all this material, which is now likely to be taken out, might publish it on another website or even as a local history book. The story of Heathrow is interesting in itself but is also relevant to the current debate about the extension of the airport, with one plan for a new runway threatening to largely wipe out the nearby village of Harmondsworth. Dubmill (talk) 09:58, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
FWIW (no published source), I attended the school in the 1950s, when it was only known as Sipson Primary School. At the end of lessons, I would have to cross to the south side of the A4 road, in order to catch a westbound bus to go home. The only fellow pupil from south of the A4 lived in one of about four houses at Perry Oaks.PeterWD (talk) 13:43, 20 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Those houses were built in 1935 by Middlesex County Council (1,2,3,4 Perry Oaks) for the sewage works staff. They later became property of the Ministry of Defence and stayed there (between the airport and the sewage works) when Heathrow Airport at its present size was built in 1944 and after.
@Ilikeeatingwaffles: About whether to include this text: "A photograph taken in the mid-1930s <ref name="Sherwood 2006, p.14"/> (taken at the same place as this Google Earth image) shows a policeman ushering at least 14 Heathrow School schoolchildren south across the Bath Road.": if you have a better source for knowing or estimating the population size of Heathrow before 1944, then please tell me it. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 05:38, 21 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Firstly, a photgraph is a primary source, and so should not be cited. Secondly, an image of 14 children crossing the road tells us that, on the day in question, a minimum of 14 children were in the area photographed and nothing else. If you had a photo of 14 children crossing the road the same day in Birmingham, what could we say about the populations of the two settlements? The best source for the population of any place in the UK from 1801 onwards is most likely the national census. Ilikeeatingwaffles (talk) 07:43, 21 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]