Pub history

The Flying Chariot

Doctor John Wilkins was the one-time rector of Cranford Parish Church, situated in the village at the east end of London Heathrow Airport. He was also Oliver Cromwell’s brother-in-law. In his book, Discovery of a New World in the Moon, published in 1638, Wilkins predicted that it should be possible ‘to make a flying chariot, in which a man may sit, and give such motion unto it, as shall convey him through the air’.