London Borough of Hillingdon

In September 2014, Heathrow pledged to double apprenticeships across the airport to 10,000 by 2030 and to recruit half of them from the local boroughs.

It said expansion could end youth unemployment in Ealing, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Slough and Spellthorne.

Those aren't like-for-like measures, admittedly, but 12 years on, the headline has halved to 5,000 opportunities of which apprenticeships are only one part.

None of that means we should dismiss it.

So we had to go elsewhere to the thing.

Fortunately, I had my Hillingham first card from when we lived together, so I could just take it

and go there.

Oh, you need that? Because you don't have to book or anything, do you? You don't have

to book.

So on the website, they said you don't need to book, but they asked you to bring your Hillingham first card so they could confirm you're a resident of the borough.

But when we got there, they didn't check anything.

Yeah, and I feel like

But yeah, this game, obviously, I watched a little bit before I jumped in the car.

So I got the tube to Hillingdon, jumped in the car, drove back to Bristol.

So when I jumped in the car, we were 7-0 up.

And then, obviously, we got a field goal.

Over the next year, the pair would write to each other almost every day while Warren was away with the RAF.

before marrying at St John's Church in Hillingdon, Middlesex, on October 7th, 1961.

And a little slight thing from me, that's actually the day I was born.

On Wednesday, they celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary at the Norton home alongside their family.

He sits on the University UK board as policy lead for research and innovation, among many other roles highly relevant to our listeners.

Under his leadership, Brunel signed a civic agreement with Hillingdon Borough.

In 2024, Brunel joined the University of London Federation, becoming a midsize institution among 17 members of the federation, but critically the first to give it a really large physical footprint in West London, where I think he's also a chair of the West London University Alliance.

And, uh, you have to say Brunel's geography is one of the most consequential in England.

Um, so probably that, that, that's the, the, the priority at the moment.

Thinking about that relationship with some of the political organizations.

Obviously, we've been working with Hillingdon in talking about their growth plans and their response to the GLA's plans for both housing and how we might, yeah, uh, and, and jobs and how we might support that, uh, as a, as an anchor player in this part of London.

So we, we sort of have that anchor role at one level geographically, and then we have a different role in the regional context that's broader than perhaps you might find in a, in a, a metropolitan center elsewhere in the regional parts of the UK.

Yes, the Model United Nations.

On Monday, I took some students to the American Collegiate School in Hillingdon, where they had an enormous auditorium full of flags.

Every 180 students that had been assigned each a different country.

And they were debating two resolutions, one on the status of refugees in different parts of the world and one on AI and warfare.

Yes.

Uh, in Hillingdon.

In Hi- where, where's Hillingdon?

Hillingdon is West London.

Ah, okay.

Yeah.