Weekly Update From Councillor Guy Lambert

A Bentley Bentayga owner dumps their rubbish in Space Waye

This has been a rather relaxed week in terms of meetings etc – perhaps Easter had something to do with it. Went with a friend on a long bike explore of the borough on Thursday taking in Heston, Hounslow Heath, Hanworth, Feltham and all points in between, discovering some unexpected joys in terms of funny and tranquil little paths next to the River Crane in the shadow of Heathrow and expected horrors like trying to get across the A30 alive.

Friday was nice and sunny but a mite parky. I had a coffee or three from a very busy Feather and Heart and some lovely chats by the lock in our version of Little Venice including with her ex-worshipfulness ex-Councillor Myra Savin. Sad to reflect that the once proud deputy-mayoral pooch has passed on to the great kennels in the sky.

Then, not much over the weekend, other than starting to grapple with the planning applications for the Tesco and Homebase sites which are coming to a full committee this Thursday (8 April). There has been a huge amount of interest in these two linked applications, reflected in the planning committee papers themselves – a mere 358 pages of A4 – and many emails from locals and concerned groups like Brentford Voice and Community Council, OWGRA, the Kew Society and of course the developers themselves. Oh, another 17 pages in the Addendum report just in! Sometimes I wish I was Boris Johnson with his legendary grasp of detail, but the feeling passes rapidly.

Oh, I almost forgot, on Saturday I was one of the hordes of spectators (me and a squirrel) for the inaugural Airball tournament in Gunnersbury Park. It’s sort of competitive keepy-uppy played on a tennis court. The players were having a lot of fun – lots of laughter and general squawking – but I think I might be just a little on the old and fat size to seek a career there.

Tuesday morning brightish and earlyish out to lovely Space Waye. In fact, lovely perhaps is not the word but it has been made a lot lovelier recently by investment in a new weighbridge (the old one was well past its ‘best before’ date) and new accommodation for the staff who work there. This is a fancy wancy Portakabin in a style apres Frank Lloyd Wright with amazing innovations such as windows and toilets. It’s fun to watch a waste site in action. There was a huge lorry on site taking a job lot of mattresses: these are notoriously difficult to recycle – and notoriously easy to dump on the street when you’re a landlord with a new tenant, for example, as we all no doubt find as we wander round this great planet of ours. I was also most impressed to see a Bentley Bentayga arriving with a load of rubbish. I always wondered why people found it necessary to spend £147,000 on one of these, but now the scales have been removed from my eyes, as the saying goes.

Later on Tuesday we had another Lampton interview, this time for an executive role as the company restructures, followed by a FoodBox trustees' meeting.

Now then, I have been copping a fair amount of flak (nothing new there) for comparing the new compound created by Team Keane to a Stalag. For clarity, Stalags are where prisoners of war were cooped up during WW2 and are not a close relation to concentration camps, but several people were offended by the comparison and I readily apologise to those who were upset.

Actually the site doesn’t look so bad and I acknowledge people are looking to improve it by planting plants etc, and I’m also all in favour of the river being used for watersports. I was very upset by the way this appeared without notice and without planning permission, on a site where there had been (not sure if it still applies) a planning obligation to build a ‘proper’ boathouse for community use. I have also had a number of negative comments from different sources and what I felt were misleading stories from the developers/operators. I understand they are now looking to apply for planning permission and to engage with some local schools, which will be welcome so I hope we can get this back on an even keel (no pun intended) and running with the tide not against it (pun intended).

Sunny day, a very long evening’s planning purgatory in prospect, still a few hundred pages to master before the meeting, a bicycle wanting to go walkies: you and I are therefore excused further nonsense until the interminable story resumes next week.

Cllr Guy Lambert

April 9, 2021