Hayes has always been a bit run down, even back in the late 1960's/ early 1970's. One of my first jobs was on the Westland Helicopter site, working for a company called Saunders-Roe. just opposite was the still thriving ( at that time ) EMI building. Heinz and Nestle still had a large presence in the town at that time, and jobs were easy to come by.

The Westland site was gradually dismantled and split into a number of units. Hitachi were one of the big name arrivals I seem to recall with a brand new building which eventually went the way of many others within a few short years, demolished. That whole area went into freefall, and what was the Westland site is still to this day pretty much an industrial wasteland. The old EMI building was allowed to go to wrack and ruin, though I believe it is being redeveloped now ?

Considering it's prime location on the doorstep of the worlds busiest international airport, with direct train links into London, it's nothing short of scandalous Hayes has been allowed to deteriorate in the way it has.

Yes, that's another point. Anyone visiting the UK and getting on a 140 through Hayes will be seeing the ghetto that is Hayes and wondering why the UK is considered so good.

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Lets be careful out there !

I was sitting in the car at the Grapes junction (Heading towards Southall) and looking at the shops there. They're pretty run down too and not a place I'd do my shopping. When I lived over that way we often used to visit the shops on the Uxbridge Road - they were interesting and inviting in those days.

I watched a guy pick up a discarded cup from the pavement (looked like milk shake with a straw in it) and go off drinking it - ugh!

What's the difference between Hayes, MIddx and Mogadishu?

One's a filthy, depressing, dangerous, decrepit, second rate, third world cesspit with no future that folk can't wait to escape
.....the other is the capital of Somalia.


Interesting points about all the industry that used to be here, I recall a Callard and Bowser factory down Pump Lane, Damart Records near the station and Sunblest Bread.

Crossrail apparently is going to put something like £30-£50K onto house prices when it comes according to experts, apart from the benefits of getting into town quicker and easier I can't see what sort of gentrification benefits it would bring, if anything the place will get worse. Places like Brentford which have had this effect recently benefit from their proximity to South Ealing, Richmond and Chiswick.

The real decline of Hayes took on a new and powerful dynamic in 1965 at the creation of the London Borough of Hillingdon (LBH). Prior to the creation of the GLC and the London boroughs, Hayes was administered locally by the Hayes & Harlington Urban District Council (HHUDC), in the County of Middlesex. Strangely, though Hayes & Harlington was politically considered too small to administer itself locally, it still retains a Hayes & Harlington MP.

After the creation of the London Boroughs of Hillingdon and Hounslow, these two London boroughs competed with each other for a greater slice of the action, and income, that the rapidly developing Heathrow was generating (that political lust for power and greed has a lot to answer for). LBH succeeded in gaining a significant slice of Heathrow's income. Along with this 'gain', LBH also realised the responsibility for providing essential services, such as housing accommodation, and social and medical services for arrivals at Heathrow.

After the creation of the LBH, Hayes was politically and conveniently regarded as the dirty end of the stick by the administrators of LBH.

With the rapid development of Heathrow LBH needed some convenient reservation for the inconvenient responsibilities arriving at Heathrow, and Hayes just happened to be so convenient to Heathrow. Hayes was also easily separated from those areas of LBH north of the A40, which were politically regarded as being more affluent, whilst Hayes was considered more effluent.

The social 'decline' of Hayes under the administration of LBH created major problems for the large local employers in Hayes. These employers found that recruiting quality staff ranged from extremely difficult to impossible because prospective recruits simply did not want to be associated with Hayes and its social problems, problems that were evident to everybody except the politicians. The demise of Hayes quickly took on a new and rapid dimension as desperate employers decided one by one to leave Hayes for locations that were more attractive to would-be employees. Inevitably, Hayes became the industrial wilderness it now is, with no serious high-tech employers wanting to have anything to do with it.

Kraft, Nestles, Callard & Bowser, British Electric Transformers, Castrol, Fairy Aviation/Westland Electric & Musical Industries, Central Research Laboratories. Such employers represented tens of thousands of quality jobs in the area, with many thousands of them being high-tech well paid employment. Now they have all gone to the four winds, never to return. And those largely responsible for this economic and social catastrophe continue to enjoy unjustified rewards for their decisions and actions.

Sadly, a similar process of economic and social destruction is affecting many other previously prosperous areas of this land we once knew as Great Britain.

We once aspired to produce goods that created real wealth and benefited those who produced them, and the customers who bought our goods. Instead we have allowed the globalist politicians to convince us that we should now consider ourselves fortunate if we can serve in fast food outlets or telephone answering sweat shops for the minimum wage – while the same politicians continue to live in unimaginable luxury and demand pay rises of a magnitude that are many times larger than the same minimum wage we ordinary folk can expect.

An excellent summary...

The council were aided in their quest to use Hayes as the Borough dustbin by the local Socialist MP who was in no position to argue against it given his principles. End result the slide to oblivion which will continue.

I will add a few more employers who have 'jumped ship' from the area missing from the previous list. Hitachi, Marks and Spencer (Dist centre), Safeway, Orbit valves a plethora of light engineering firms which used to reside down Clayton and Blythe rd. A number of reasonable pubs which it must always be remembered provided meaningful employment. Manufacturing firms down Pump Lane.

Without a doubt I have missed some as did Westonman, lets see if we can add to this list and really discover how bad the situation has got.

Hayes is fast approaching Tower Hamlets status. A dirty toilet where few people want to live. It hurts me to say it but such is the way of things today.

If the said MP was a proper Socialist he'd have the interests of the populace that's been here for generations at heart, if you recall New Labour were hoping to socially engineer a permanent foothold of New Labour voters ad infinitum in these sorts of towns ,this place the way it is is his cash cow and it's not in his interests to own up to the decline, I think he's around the 60 mark age wise, so pretty soon it'll be retirement, a ministerial index linked pension, off to a four bedroom detached house in Dorset and 'so long suckers, nice knowing you' and the baton will be passed on to a locally born Somalian who will no doubt have the interests of the 'local' populace at heart.