From the Norman Foster plans published Nov 11. For the first time since the Romans, Middlesex is not central to Britain's transport links.

The Foster scheme has a second implication for the former-Middlesex boroughs of North and West London: the new rail links to the North and to the Continent skirt them entirely. So the old county would be lose its historic importance as the gateway to London, which it had as the site of the Roman roads, the docks, the railway approaches and most recently as the birthplace of aviation. It seems almost as politically impossible to shut down Heathrow as it’s been to find room for more runways in the South East. Ken Livingstone has been making defending Heathrow a plank of his mayoral campaign. But the national threat of high unemployment and negative economic growth can be powerfully persuasive. The kind of fate that could be in store for Heathrow’s 12 sq kilometers is depicted in the sort of plans prepared for places like Old Oak Common, very similar to the instant developments taking place in China’s new giant cities. Another and better approach would be to re-evaluate the unappreciated potential in the urban sprawl of the Middlesex suburbs.  Heathrow was once a Neolithic monumental site.

Before London Airport: a market garden at daffodil time

Much more recently it was rich market gardens, in the heart of a county largely dedicated to Londoners’ pleasure and recreation. The wheat of Heston, just to the east of Heathrow, was so good that Queen Elizabeth used it for her manchet bread , according to John Middleton, author of A View of the Agriculture of Middlesex (1798). The most attractive way to plan for Heathrow, and more generally  for Middlesex, will be through re-appreciating existing buildings and finding new uses for them, and by showing an appreciation of local history — the same kind of approach, in fact, that revived Notting Hill and Islington in the 60s and 70s and Hoxton, Shoreditch and Dalston in the last few years. And with Heathrow’s agricultural history and its legendary soils, at least some of its 3,000 acres might be used for new allotments.

Distant London seen from suburban Hampstead: An English Autumn Afternoon by Ford Madox Brown, painted 1852 - 1855.

There’s a prejudice against outer London. A successful young(ish) restaurateur tells  me he’s thinking of emigrating because even with £300K to put down he couldn’t buy a family house in central London. A woman I know has become a kind of stripper to raise enough funds to ward off a move out to Hangar Lane or beyond. But it’s time to get real.

Mixed emotions: novelist Evelyn Waugh and first wife Evelyn Gardner in then-unfashionable Canonbury Square in 1928

It’s all relative. George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh both lived in Canonbury Square in Islington, not out of choice, but because it was what they could afford. The then-grimy and overcrowded streets of N1 provided Orwell with the inspiration for the London he describes in 1984). After the war planners thought the population of the south east would fall. Instead the UK population is 15% higher than in the days of Waugh and Orwell and everyone wants to live in the south east. Just as in the 60s the Victorian suburbs came back into fashion, in our day, Middlesex looms.

So brace yourself for a plunge into London’s overlooked outer ring — the large slice that would fall between the hands of a centrally located clock standing at about twenty to one. It includes Queensbury, Sudbury, West Drayton, Boston Manor, Pinner, Hounslow, Hendon, Edmonton, Rayners Lane,  Brentford, Greenford, Willesden Junction,  Kenton, Isleworth, Hanwell, Wembley Park, Edgware, North Harrow…  With some exceptions (Pinner, Totteridge, Hatch End,  Hampstead Garden Suburb)  it’s (relatively) affordable if not glamorous territory… the sorts of places where we at Hoxton Beach work, or live, or buy our supplies (our customers tend to be more central.) This is J. G. Ballard country: the 020 8 area, TfL zone 4 and upwards;  to the uninformed it’s a featureless sprawl.  But by looking through the unfamiliar prism of the extinct county of Middlesex we hope to reveal its riches and, at times, strangeness.

Cities are often surrounded with parkland. In London’s case this was Middlesex — not a bad name for somewhere neither one thing nor the other: not real town nor real country. Like Venice’s  terra firma, dotted with Palladian villas, or the outskirts of Naples sweeping around its bay, London’s countryside became a playground and a refuge. It’s somewhere where you could imagine Marx and Engel’s demand in the 1848 Communist Manifesto for the ‘abolition of the distinction between town and country’ starting to take shape. Middlesex was always tied in to London’s economy, but it became the semi-independent powerhouse of Britain’s revival from the Depression of the 1930s both with the building boom that created Metroland and as the home of a new wave of industry: light engineering, consumer goods and aviation.  Even so, much open space was preserved by its own county council , which bought up swathes of fields and forests together with the London County Council before both were abolished on 1 April 1965. The Green Belt was created at a time (post war) when it was believed that the population would fall. Now the Institute of Directors, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Spiked Online crowd are calling for it to be built on to help the national economy, fight house price inflation and ease homelessness. But what would be built? Outer London is already littered with places put up too quickly with too little thought because the abundance of available land encouraged careless planning and design. And when Middlesex lost its name it ran the risk of becoming a lost cause.  But fashions have been changing, from as long ago as 1973 when Richard Mabey’s book ‘The Unofficial Countryside’ looked through fresh eyes at the wild life of what’s now being called the  ‘edge lands’.  Academics have created a new ‘burgeoning’ interdisciplinary field called Suburban Studies. Long before Los Angeles, Middlesex was where a new kind of sprawling city was invented. Most of the world’s population now lives like this. The former county is still  overshadowed by central London; but the suburban dream, of being linked both to the metropolis and to the natural world, is alive and well , Middlesex is hanging onto its cosmopolitan and tolerant character, it has a huge wealth of history and culture, and it deserves to be known by its proper name.