A Twickenham Road Manhole Cover is Not the Aswan Dam

Brentford West councillor Guy Lambert reports back

Cllr Guy Lambert

February 16, 2024

On Friday morning I was in the Mission Hall on the Haverfield estate. I wonder how many people in Brentford have visited this or even know it exists. It’s just East of Ealing Road and is a community centre and I suppose has been there since I suppose the 1960s or 1970s. Not an architectural gem but a decent building with good facilities, which I understand has been taken under the direct management of the council.

Years ago I remember going there with The Melvinator, who lives nearby. At the time it was run by a community group but it seemed to be a challenge to get the local people to manage it. Whatever, the purpose of our meeting was to be introduced to the work that has been going on to provide a community hub for Brentford.

This has been already achieved in Feltham and the intention is to provide a kind of ‘one stop shop’ to help people to access the services they need, whether these are provided by the council, local community organisations and charities.

They have already started work with the Clayponds Community centre up in the North of the area, near the Ealing border, and a centre that has had excellent leadership from a community group.

It was an interesting exchange of ideas and this will take on more services to deliver locally as the idea develops.

Somebody had been complaining about traffic jams on Twickenham Road so I cycled down that way in the afternoon, accidently but suitably at school going home time. It really was bedlam from Busch Corner all the way down to South Street, to the extent that I took my bike into the gutter to allow an ambulance to go past me on the wrong side of the road. It took me a while to cycle there because there was no room to cycle at the points where the cycle lane runs out, but I made it in the end. When I got there (it was about 3.45) there was nobody doing anything apart from the bloke who looks after traffic lights hanging around looking at people using a pedestrian crossing on South Street, having parked his truck in a handy place within the road works barriers.

As you can see, the repair causing this apocalypse in the traffic was not exactly on a par with constructing the Aswan Dam and awkward people like me wonder whether the sainted Thames Water couldn’t have fixed this on Friday by doing half an hour overtime, though their notice gave an expected time to finish it on the next Wednesday. Of course, it would be awful to interfere in any way with the ability of Thames Water to make profit, and pay their taxes and dump sewage in the rivers Thames and Brent. After all, on their profit in 2022 of £177.3 M they appear to have paid an enormous amount of tax of Minus 0.3 M – I’m sure you’ll agree that is usury by the government. If you follow their accounts the shares are held by UK companies but if you follow the data you end up with a company called Kemble Water Holdings Ltd which used to be based in Guernsey (obviously) but now seems to have relocated to Reading. I could spend far too much time down this rabbit hole but I should get out more.

On Saturday us Labourites trekked up to Hounslow House to be updated on technology and approaches that the Party is modernising as we get near to a Mayoral and (I hope) a general election. I’m a bit of an old hand these days but everything changes and I need to catch up!

Then on Sunday we were all up at the Digital Dock for our collective surgery. The attendance at these is pretty thin these days – actually has been all the time I’ve been a councillor – because the vast majority ring us, or email, or text us or we pick up their issues via social media etc. Councilloring must have been fundamentally different 20 or 30 years ago and I always noticed that The Melvinator had a ‘flock’ that turned up at the surgeries we had in previous years in Mission Hall, actually. He had a number of regulars who came every month and were put out on the days when there was only me, usually because Mel was in Burnley or Bristol supporting the Bees.

For once in my life I attended early at the Digital Dock and had my recent event about street clutter on my mind. Going along the High Street I found a lot of the clutter that people were pointing out in my seminar:

Advertising installations disguised as telephone boxes – here’s an example, but there are others

Redundant parking pay machines – so handsome

Redundant street signs and cones, one of my favourites (I did eventually get rid of the one about parking for the Mela in Gunnersbury Park)

I must get around to a campaign about this but I bet I’ll find that BT have a permanent licence to put up telephone boxes wherever they fancy on the basis they provide a public service. By the way, the luxury shoe is not detritus, it contains an important foot. At least important to me.

Rabbit Rabbit. Monday I was supposed to go and see our party organiser in Chiswick but he stood me up so I had a day for cycling around getting super fit (no laughing). On Tuesday I had booked into a seminar about reducing Fly Tipping but for reasons buried deep in the organiser’s tech or mine I had only pictures and my lip reading doesn’t cut the mustard.

In the afternoon, a call with a local artist who has a plan which I’m looking to modestly fund, then a trustee meeting at the FoodBox, then a meeting in the evening with the Friends of St Pauls Recreation park, at The Griffin so a nice change of scene.

Wednesday I had some time out then we had a Labour branch meeting in the evening at the Free Church. On Thursday morning I had an update with my officer chum on the announcement of the Pavement Pledge arrangements which will be going out very soon. Then in theory I had a meeting with other councils and the NHS on the Health Integration scheme but (it wasn’t my week) I logged into the meeting and was told for the next hour that somebody would let me in when the meeting started. If it did, they never told me!

In the afternoon it was the Lampton Shareholder meeting and after that, still in lovely Hounslow House, it was the Overview and Scrutiny Committee which I attended even though there was little on my area of responsibility.

So that was my week. Sunny this Friday morning so I’ll be out at one of our café hostelries for my elevenses.

Councillor Guy Lambert