Hayes is a town in west London. Historically situated within the county of Middlesex, it is now part of the London Borough of Hillingdon. The town's population, including its localities Hayes End, Harlington and Yeading, was recorded in the 2021 census as 93,928. It is situated west of Charing Cross, or east of Slough. Hayes is served by the Great Western Main Line, and Hayes & Harlington railway station is on the Elizabeth line. The Grand Union Canal flows through the town centre.
Hayes has a long history. The area appears in the Domesday Book (1086). Landmarks in the area include the Grade II* listed Parish Church, St Mary's – the central portion of the church survives from the twelfth century and it remains in use (the church dates back to 830 A.D.) – and Grade-II-listed Barra Hall, the Town Hall from 1924 to 1979.
Hayes is known as the erstwhile home of EMI. The words "Hayes, Middlesex" appear on the reverse of The Beatles' albums, which were manufactured at the town's Old Vinyl Factory. The town centre's "gold disc" installation marks the fiftieth anniversary on 1 June 2017 of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, manufactured in Hayes in 1967. Nearby London Heathrow Airport is the largest single provider of employment.
Notable historical residents include the early modern "father of English music", William Byrd, and a pre-eminent figure of twentieth-century English literature, George Orwell.
Etymology The place-name Hayes comes from the Anglo-Saxon Hǣs or Hǣse: "(land overgrown with) brushwood". In the Domesday book (1086), it is spelt Hesa. The town's name is spelt Hessee in a 1628 entry in an Inquisition post mortem held at The National Archives.Calendar of Inquisitions Post-Mortem; National Archives; C 142/737/191; for Francis Awsiter, a wealthy landowner in the area; (in Latin): line 17 of document: "Hayes als. Hessee"
History Hayes is formed of what originally were five separate villages: Botwell, Hayes Town, Hayes End, Wood End and Yeading. The name Hayes Town has come to be applied to the area around Station Road between Coldharbour Lane and Hayes & Harlington railway station, but this was historically the hamlet called Botwell. The original Hayes Town was the area to the east of St Mary's Church, centred around Church Road, Hemmen Lane and Freeman's Lane.
A 2007 archaeological study looks back to earliest times. It describes finds such as flint tools dating to the Paleolithic period (500,000 BC - 10,000 BC) at the sites of Botwell, EMI Company works, and Colbrook Avenue (near Dawley Road) [4.1.2]; more finds dating to the Mesolithic period (10,000 BC - 4,000 BC) at the site of Lake Farm Country Park [4.1.3]. The site of Wyre Grove (off North Hyde Road) produced finds including pottery from the Bronze Age (2,400 BC - 700 BC), Iron Age (700 BC - AD 43), Romano-British period (AD 43 - 410) and early Anglo-Saxon period (AD 410 - 1066) [4.1.6-11]. The report cites an 831 grant as evidence that the Botwell area has existed as a settlement since Anglo-Saxon times [4.1.12].
For some 700 years up to 1546, Hayes formed part of the Archbishop of Canterbury's estates, ostensibly owing to grants from the Mercian royal family. In that year, the then-Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was forced to surrender his land to King Henry VIII, who subsequently granted the estate to Edward North, 1st Baron North. The area changed hands several times thereafter, but by the eighteenth century, two family-names had established themselves as prominent and long-time landowners: Minet and Shackle.
John Wesley (1703–1791) and Charles Wesley (1707–1788), founders of the evangelical Methodist movement, preached in Hayes on at least ten occasions between 1748 and 1753. The Salvation Army – founded in 1865 in London by William Booth – registered a barracks in Hayes between 1887 and 1896; their hall, or "citadel", at 71 Coldharbour Lane was registered in 1927. The Hayes division served the local community for just short of a century, and in years gone by their own Salvation Army brass band performed around the town's streets. In 2024, the Salvation Army hall closed and was put up for sale.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Hayes was home to several private boarding schools catering for wealthy families. The former Manor House on Church Road was by the 1820s a boys' school called Radnor House Academy (a.k.a. Manor House Academy); Grove Cottage, Wood End, a school for young men, opened in the 1830s; Belle House School for Boys opened on Botwell Lane in the 1840s (it is now St Mary's Convent); in the first half of the 19th century, the Wood End House School for Young Ladies stood on the site of what is now the Norman Leddy Memorial Gardens; the former Magdalen Hall on Hayes End Road was also a 19th-century private School for Young Ladies.
Wood End House (before 1848, the site of the Wood End House School for Young Ladies) was used – from 1848 to c. 1905 – as an asylum. Notable psychiatrist John Conolly (1794–1866) was one of its licensed proprietors, between 1848 and 1866. The building was demolished in 1961.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, Hayes's key areas of work were agriculture and brickmaking. The Second Industrial Revolution brought change in the late nineteenth century, up to World War I. The town's location on the Grand Junction Canal (later called the Grand Union) and the Great Western Railway – Hayes & Harlington railway station had opened in 1868 – made it well-placed for industry.
The town's favourable location caused the Hayes Development Company to make available sites on the north-side of the railway, adjacent to the canal, and Hayes became a centre for engineering and industry. HDC's company secretary, Alfred Clayton, is commemorated in the name of Clayton Road. Residential districts consisting of dwellings of the garden suburb type were built to house workers after World War I.
In 1904, the parish council created Hayes Urban District (from 1930, Hayes and Harlington Urban District) in order to address the issue of population growth. Hayes and Harlington Urban District continued until 1965 when Hayes became part of the newly established London Borough of Hillingdon. On 1 April 1965 the civil parish was abolished. At the 1951 census (one of the last before the abolition of the parish), Hayes had a population of 49,650.
Barra Hall – Grade II listed since 1974 – was Hayes town hall between 1924 and 1979. Originally a manor house called Grove House, in the late 18th century it was home to Alderman Harvey Combe, Lord Mayor of London in 1799. It became Barra Hall in 1875, after Robert Reid – descendant of the Reid baronets of Barra – became owner. Army Cavalry were stationed at Barra Hall during World War I. After Hayes Urban District Council bought the Hall and its grounds in 1923, the grounds of the new Town Hall were given over to public use as a public park – with playground, tennis courts and paddling pool; it was opened by actress Jessie Matthews. In July 2024, a century on from Hayes Urban District's 1923 purchase, Hillingdon Council sold Barra Hall, to HRUC. Notwithstanding the sale, the Council claimed it would safeguard the building for the future, such that it would remain a key asset to local residents.
Writer Mabel Lethbridge (1900–1968) was a munitions worker in World War I at National Filling Factory No. 7, Hayes when on 23 October 1917 she was severely injured in an explosion: others were killed. Lethbridge was at the time the youngest person to receive the British Empire Medal – in recognition of her service – and she wrote about her experience at the Hayes munitions factory in her first book, Fortune Grass (1934). National Filling Factory No. 7 was situated on land south of the railway which would later become Nestles Avenue, extending almost down to where the M4 at Cranford is now. The Hayes munitions factory employed approximately 10,000 women and 2,000 men.
Author George Orwell, who adopted his pen name while living in Hayes, lived and worked in 1932–3 as a schoolmaster at The Hawthorns High School for Boys, situated on Church Road. The school subsequently closed and the original building survived until 2022 as the Fountain House Hotel. The hotel displayed a plaque commemorating its distinguished former resident. Returning several times to Hayes, Orwell was at the same time characteristically acerbic about his time in the town, camouflaging it lightly as West Bletchley in Coming Up for Air, as Southbridge in A Clergyman's Daughter, and grumbling comically in a letter to Eleanor Jacques:
Hayes . . . is one of the most godforsaken places I have ever struck. The population seems to be entirely made up of clerks who frequent tin-roofed chapels on Sundays and for the rest bolt themselves within doors.
The present-day Hayes Police Station – at 755 Uxbridge Road, UB4 8HU – opened on 19 June 1938.
The Grade II listed War Memorial at Cherry Lane Cemetery on Shepiston Lane commemorates what is believed to have been the most serious single incident (in respect of casualties) in Hayes during World War II. Thirty-seven workers of the Gramophone Company, Blyth Road – then the town's largest employer – were killed on 7 July 1944 when a German V-1 flying bomb or "doodle-bug" hit a factory surface air-raid shelter. The original bomb census form, now held in the National Archives, confirms that it was a flying bomb which landed at 14.59 hours, killing twenty-four people and seriously injuring twenty-one (some of the seriously injured died later). The bomb came down at the main entrance to one shelter, causing the concrete roof to collapse. Some of the badly injured were able to be rescued from the emergency exit at the rear, but others were trapped for some hours. Twelve of the victims are buried in a mass grave in Cherry Lane Cemetery.
The Sound of Hayes Clock is located at the junction of Station Road and Station Approach. The Cabinet Office granted special permission for the clock to be inscribed in honour of Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee. The inscription reads: "installed on 12 September 2023 to mark the reign of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II".
Hayes featured in a 2011 House of Commons debate about social housing in London. It was alleged in the Parliamentary debate (as recorded in Hansard) that a "sort of ruthless developer is taking over entire sites in [the Hayes] area to build the slums of the future."
Industry Hayes has, over the years, been heavily involved with industry, both local and international, having been the home of EMI, Nestlé and H. J. Heinz Company. As well as Fairey Aviation (later merged with Westland).
The first large factory established was that of the British Electric Transformer Company (affectionately known as the B.E.T.), which moved to Hayes in 1901. The B.E.T.'s main product was the Berry transformer, invented by A. F. Berry (the company's technical adviser and a member of the board of directors); Berry also invented the Tricity cooker.
The most significant early occupier was the Gramophone Company / EMI. The Hayes factory's foundation stone was laid by Dame Nellie Melba. The EMI archives and some early reinforced concrete factory buildings (notably Grade II listed Enterprise House on Blyth Road, the first known work of Evan Owen Williams – described by English Heritage as "the most significant engineer turned architect in twentieth-century British architecture") remain as The Old Vinyl Factory.
It was here, in the Central Research Laboratories (generally known as "CRL"), that Isaac Shoenberg developed (1934) the all-electronic 405-line television system (called the Marconi-EMI system, used by the BBC from 1936 until closedown of the Crystal Palace 405-line transmissions in 1985).