Heston is first mentioned in the novel as Margret is looking at an atlas. She is looking at a map of England to find a place for her mother and Dixon to stay while her and her father look for houses in Milton. Margret says that she heard that Heston is a "pleasant little bathing-place" and believes that the ocean air will be good for her mother to calm her before they make the move into Milton. Mrs. Hale and Dixon stay in Heston for about two weeks, which was quite the expenditure for Mr. Hale. Margret does not care about the detour into Heston because she believes that the fresh air will do her mother some good before they have to move to Milton where the air is less clean.

To Brits at the time of the novel, Heston would have been a well known costal town, much like it is in the novel. In my research of Heston, the most notable thing about the town was that it had an established parish, but for the most part it was just a town where people would stop on their way to someplace else. To the readers, it would have just been a known location.

Heston was important in sort of foreshadowing how Mrs. Hale was going to react to living in Milton. From the very beginning, she was reluctant to move. She couldn't bare the thought of staying in a hotel in Milton while Mr. Hale and Margret were looking for a home, so she stayed in a small vacation town by the water to calm her nerves about the whole uprooting. This shows that she was never going to settle well into live in Milton. Both she and Dixon stay in Heston while Mr. Hale and Margret are in Milton, which is also symbolic of how the characters were going to react to life in Milton. Toward the end of the novel, Margret showed that she actually enjoyed her time in Milton, which was sort of apparent from the start of the novel, whereas Dixon and Mrs Hale never really settled in. 

Lysons, Daniel. "Heston." The Environs of London: Volume 3, County of Middlesex. London: T Cadell and W Davies, 1795. 22-45. British History Online. Web. 21 October 2021. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-environs/vol3/pp22-45.

https://democraticservices.hounslow.gov.uk/documents/s135417/Heston%20Vi...