As I mentioned in last Saturday’s blog, I had just spent a night at a Heathrow airport hotel. I just saw this article in the International Herald Tribune that reminded me of something I learned en route.

I’d booked the Holiday Inn Heathrow through LateRooms.com when I found out that the friend I’d planned to stay with that night had to be out of town. Since I’d been shopping by price, I hadn’t noticed there were two Holiday Inns at Heathrow (only one of them was offering a last-minute discount, so that was all I saw). My driver, fortunately, knew of it. We pulled into the one that is right off the motorway at the Heathrow exit, but then I pulled up the confirmation on my Blackberry and saw that mine was supposed to be on Bath Road. He knew where that was, too.

That’s all by way of explaining why we took a detour through a cute little village named Sipson. We were just off the motorway, near a big international airport, and here we were on the single street of a nice little English village, so I asked the driver what it was called. He told me it was Sipson, and that it wouldn’t be there much longer. He told me pretty much what the IHT article, above, explains: that a new runway is planned for Heathrow that will involve the demolition of the entire village.

Various organizations are fighting the plan, but it’s probably too late for Sipson anyway. People are moving away, vacant properties are attracting vandals, people can’t sell their homes, etc. Probably by the time it’s sorted out, the remaining people will mostly be glad to leave. I saw something similar happen in Connecticut. The state wanted to widen Route 7, a north-south connector through Fairfield County, and announced that at some point it would exercise eminent domain to seize properties close to the existing route. For more than 10 years, the people who owned those properties–many of them residential–couldn’t sell them as homes. Many were rented out to a variety of fly-by-night shops and businesses; few were improved. In that case, the state finally backed off the plan for most of the route, so owners had been subjected to more than a decade of heartache, and drivers to a decade of eyesores, for nothing.

So my heart goes out to the people of Sipson. And, coming from this young country, I’m more bothered by the loss of a place that has been standing for so long. As travelers, we tend to welcome the thought of Heathrow getting bigger and more efficient. But the next time I hear the phrase “What price progress?” I’m going to think of Sipson and wonder if the price is too high.

–Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer