A Peek into Brentford's Hidden High Street at GSK

Brentford West councillor Guy Lambert reports back

Cllr Guy Lambert

March 15, 2024

On Friday morning with some colleagues I had a tour of the GSK building. I went there once a few years ago for some event or another and remember how astonished I was about it. It is a most impressive building inside and clearly GSK was a business with plenty of scope to do things at a high standard, but I remember thinking the chances of getting people to the restaurants in Brentford High Street were very small, because there is a High Street inside the building there.

A lot of the staff have gone, as one piece of the old GSK has gone elsewhere (Woking I think) and the other piece is also going later this year. But several restaurants and coffee shops, a convenience shop, and even a bike shop are still there. I talked to the people there about whether there was any option for ‘meanwhile’ use as there are a lot of people looking locally but they won’t have control for a few moths yet – they expect September.

We went up to a deserted top floor (bet that’s where the directors used to live) and the views are stunning

Afterwards I went off for a coffee at The Potting Shed Café in Boston Manor Park. The staff are lovely, the coffee is good and it is very modest in price. Interesting stuff in there from local artists etc – a pleasure to visit. I noticed the car park was almost completely full, don’t know who the parkers are but I hope we’re making a few quid from the charges. However it would be good if the car park was available for park users – bad luck if you were trying to visit by car on Friday!

There are works going on to improve the playground which apparently will take the whole of March and I have also chased the horizontal gatepost, which apparently is going to be fixed in April, ready for the next visit of Junction 2 to probably knock it down again 😂 .

The meadow down near the Brent/canal was looking really stunning

In the evening I was down at the 6 Bells for another meeting to move forward our project to get Brentford registered as a Heritage Harbour. It was great to see the 6 Bells full of people, a state that it has not been in very often since I’ve been in Brentford. On the other hand, some of them had been in the pub for a while and were conversing enthusiastically (about 200 decibels) which meant my ability to converse was limited given my ageing lugholes.

We did make progress and people are off considering setting up a formal organization – a charity or a friendly society – different models have different features – and I was gratified to see it as part of the Brentford Town Centre Plan. Pretty good for something I first heard about in November last year. Lots of enthusiasts and we have a good chance to get this off the ground.

On Sunday we had our monthly surgery at the Digital Dock. The number of people who come are always very limited – very rarely even one from my ward and generally less than 5 from all 3 Brentford wards. We sometimes worry about that, but I think the reality is that people prefer to call us on the phone, or text, or email, or occasionally Twitter (refuse to call it X) or the local online ‘press’. Or some beard me in the street, which I generally welcome. A few use different channels which generally get less response – for example if you try and contact me via Facebook Messenger I often don’t even notice them. A chap has only so much capacity.

Monday was my ‘day off’ postponed from my normal Friday date where I try to not do council stuff, not entirely successfully. On Tuesday I was off to Mullane House, in Boston Manor Road. The managing agents there are making a complete Horlicks of managing waste and the poor man who I spoke to basically live 1 foot from an open tip, full of rank black bags etc. Some landlords/managing agents have no shame. Trying to get some improvement organized by my council team. Not difficult if we can persuade people to pay attention.

Wednesday was my car’s 6 th birthday so for a birthday treat I took him/her up to my long-time trusted service garage at Capital Motors in Chiswick. I find I have done 2,200 miles in the last year which is actually a bit more than I’ve done in recent years but that was enough for the garage to need to replace my rear brake pads. When I were a lad cars wore shoes rather than pads but I’m hopeful that the shoes have now been transferred to children.

I went home by Lime bike, which turned out to have very little in the matter of brakes, whether shod or padded, like cars were when I were a lad. I reported it when I parked it (in the pen, before you ask) and I advised the lady who was renting one to choose another. She pointed out that ‘mine’ had been taken out of service – it had a little red light – because I had reported the defect, which I actually found quite impressive (unlike their record in dealing with bikes parked in the wrong place. The one I reported the Tuesday before was still there on Sunday).

In the evening we had a Labour meeting in the Free Church. We were debating a proposed motion (not something I have much time for) complaining about Frank Hester OBE being a rancid racist, not for him given £10M (or is it £15M) to the tory party no doubt derived from the work his company (or is it?) do for providing Systmonline software for the NHS (including the practice I use). The circular economy in practice – the NHS controlled by the Tory government give an enormous contract to Hester’s ‘company’ TPP, they pay out an enormous dividend to the owner and he recycles it to the Tory party. Neat.

I have a particular interest in this because if, as I assumed, TPP is a UK company, I would expect to find its details, and those of its owner and fellow directors on Companies House. But as far as I can see they aren’t there. None of them. So there are no accounts or any other detail. Wikipedia says they are The Phoenix Partnership (Leeds) Ltd (TPP), a software company based in Leeds but they don’t seem to be on the Companies Register. Private Eye seem to have found them and report they made pre-tax profits of £48M in 2021/2 on a turnover of £76M, which like me you might think is nice work if you can get it. I have written to Lord Gnome’s secretary E.Strobes but thus far I have only had a holding response.

The street that leads to my home has a huge hole in it at present. If you want to know what works to reprofile a main sewer looks like - who doesn’t? – they look like this.

So, around to Thursday and a couple of meetings. One was with the council people who are putting together our approach to integrating NHS and social services. We’ve decided to focus on one immediate programme, to deal with frail people who need support but where it would be better for them and more economical to support them in the home rather than in hospital. There is also a more strategic aim, to deal better with the increasing number of elderly people in the borough, and the increased numbers of people with long term conditions, and also to improve the health of those who are not as healthy – mainly people on low incomes and/or certain ethnicities.

We think we can do much better with these but all involved – GPs, hospitals, community health, council – have to be open to new ways of working. An exciting and challenging task, but potentially with very big benefits. I was shocked to hear (slightly aside to the above) that in some parts of the country older or frail people stay in hospital sometimes for weeks because there is no suitable place to move them to. Somebody I know had her mother, who had suffered a stroke, moved from hospital to a hotel paid for by the NHS until she was fit to move home. Awful for her and for the costs.

In the afternoon I met with people who are managing the construction of Cycleway9. A resident of Holland Gardens had been involved in a collision with a bus (and some abuse by the bus driver and a construction worker) when she tried to turn into her drive there. We looked at the road configuration. No solid conclusions but a learning session.

That’s my week, except this morning (Friday) I had a short meeting with people from Lampton Homes, despite this supposed to be my day off this week.

So now it’s 11.30 and I’m FREE for the weekend and can go and do FREE things, such as sitting in my living room watching TV, though I don’t expect anything will beat Liverpool 6, Sparta Prague 1 (11-2 aggregate) which I saw last evening.

Councillor Guy Lambert