There is a part of the world where children are so used to aircraft taking off that when they draw aeroplanes they often depict them with the undercarriages down. These children do not live near some distant US military airbase or near one of the 30 major new airports built in China in the past five years. They live in the rather more innocuous suburban confines of the London Borough of Hounslow. And the source of their pictorial precision is none other than Heathrow Airport.

Heathrow isn’t in Hounslow; it’s in the neighbouring west London borough of Hillingdon. But as Heathrow is in Hillingdon’s southern tip and its flight path runs in an east-westerly direction, it is Hounslow, lying directly to the east, that bears the brunt of its aviation impact.

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