The green space is huge, and littered with crumbling boathouses and stone follies. The remains of a Gothic building stand just over shoulder-high, ivy-draped with thick branches rising from the soil like the muscles of the Green Man himself, Pan reaching out to reclaim the structure for the earth and restore the natural order. Kids run around with ice cream-smeared faces. I hear the clatter of studs on a concrete path by the cricket pitch as a batsman makes his way from the squat pavilion out to the crease. You could easily spend the day here in what Maxwell calls ‘London’s Wonderland’, but I need to push on to reach Hounslow Heath by sunset.
I emerge from Gunnersbury Park under the M4 flyover on the A4 Great West Road. Facing me are the Brompton Folding Bicycle Factory and the Sega Europe HQ. A huge image of Sonic the Hedgehog flies overhead like an avatar of the Sky God.
The Great West Road rises in central London and scoots along Fleet Street, following the path of the Roman road that headed west from Newgate bound for the health resort at Aquae Sulis (Bath). It’s been suggested – in my imagination by a man with a beard wearing sandals – that this section of the road follows an ancient ley line and the Romans merely built along a pre-existing trackway. There could be something in this theory as the route takes you past the Neolithic sites of West Kennet Long Barrow and Silbury Hill, places that are over 5,000 years old. It’s an interesting revision of the idea of the Romans as great innovators into a new role as conservationists.
The ancient trackways have been described as the ‘green roads of England’, but there’s nothing green about this particular passage of the A4 built in the 1920s. The new Great West Road horrified Gordon S. Maxwell, ‘This arterial horror sears the face of rural Middlesex,’ he declaimed. I have a vision of him in tweeds standing by the roadside angrily waving his walking stick at the vehicles trundling past in a futile protest at the onward march of the motor age.
I’d read a letter in the Hounslow, Heston and Whitton Chronicle from a man who’d worked for the Sperry Gyroscope Company on the Great West Road, manufacturing ‘highly secret components for the war effort’. Steel rings produced here ended up inside the Enigma code-breaking machines at Bletchley Park, ultimately hastening the end of the Second World War.
This part of the road was known as the Golden Mile due to the concentration of big-name manufacturers. There were Smith’s crisps, Gillette razor blades, Beecham’s pharmaceuticals, Firestone tyres, Maclean’s toothpaste, Currys electrical goods and Coty cosmetics, illuminated by a ‘kinetic sculpture’ of a Lucozade bottle pouring neon orange liquid into a glass. It was like a Sunset Strip for factories.
This was the centre of a new 20th-century consumerism. British companies seizing the era of mass production and advertising, and American corporations branching into the European market spearheaded their campaigns from this stretch of tarmac through Brentford.
Art deco was the dominant architectural style that captured the mood of the moment, led by the practice of Wallis, Gilbert and Partners. Their crowning glory was the Hoover Building on the Western Avenue, now a branch of Tesco. They did for art deco in London what Banksy has done for graffiti. Commissioned to build factories they produced artworks that outlived the industries they were erected to house.
I now approached another of their signature constructions, Wallis House, originally built for Simmonds Aerocessories, which sits at the centre of what Barratt Homes are calling the Great West Quarter or GWQ. The new-build elements of the development look as though they’ve been more inspired by post-war East German social housing than the art deco masterpiece that looms over the grey blocks named after the factories of the Golden Mile. Like much of East Germany, the place is deserted.
From the moment I gazed through the window of the Sales and Marketing Suite at the scale model of the ‘premier development scheme in Brentford’, I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be welcome inside. I go in anyway and half-consider posing as a potential buyer, but my current look as an out-of-work Status Quo roadie gives the game away before I can even start my spiel.
‘I’m writing a book …’ I say, thinking this must convey some sort of respectability, but don’t get much further.
There is light jazz playing softly and a clean-cut corporate vibe is sucking up the oxygen. The immaculately dressed young man behind the desk repeats the word ‘book’ like someone mispronouncing the name of the aforementioned King Cnut. He’s on to me straight away and probably could have composed my previous paragraph for me in advance. I’ve got ‘long-term renter and ex-squatter’ written through me like a stick of rock and he probably works on commission.
We silently acknowledge the gulf between our worlds and attempt to make small talk. He tells me all the flats are sold, but not much else. I wish him well and skulk off back towards the Great West Road with the Barratt Homes flags fluttering in the pollution like the standards of a conquering army. I spot the first signs of civilian life, a child circling the empty car park on a scooter; it reminds me of images of Midwestern trailer parks, isolated and forgotten.
The large block next to the GWQ still awaits its Cinderella moment. The ivy has started to wind its way around the concrete and steel frame, the lower loading bay has flooded, possibly from the brook that gives Brook Lane running down one side its name. The New England Bar and Restaurant on the corner is boarded-up and fly-tipped. It reeks of the foul stench of decomposition.
A scene from an early Sid James Ealing Comedy, The Rainbow Jacket, was shot in this street. For the filming, a prop-built post-box was placed on the street corner. Some residents mistook this for the Royal Mail acknowledging the long walk to the main post office and dropped off their letters. But at the end of the day the celluloid letterbox was loaded into a van and driven away, with the mail dispatched at the post office.
I’ve been jungle trekking in Thailand and have explored the vast Niah Caves in Sarawak, but this walk along the A4 felt like the hardest slog yet. After sucking in car fumes for a couple of miles I crossed the River Brent and was sorely tempted to jump in. With my head starting to spin and the exhaust gases shimmering on the asphalt horizon, the scene started to resemble the classic Western movie moment when the cowboy is lost in the desert, vultures circling overhead, except in my case it’s jumbo jets coming in to land at Heathrow.
Standing in the shadow of the boarded-up Gillette Building, which is preparing for a new life as a swanky hotel, I decide I can take no more of this road walking. I’ve tried to conjure up images of the Neolithic trackway, of Romans heading off on holiday, of stagecoaches and open fields, but all I see is a blur of high-performance automobiles. It’s incredible that anything manages to live here, but where soil has blown into gaps in the concrete and tarmac a diverse ecology of roadside plants flourishes. The organisms we brand as weeds soak up the toxins of the man-made world, even managing to sprout the odd flower to lure in pollinating insects. People somehow inhabit proud inter-war villas lining the kerbside of the type that George Orwell described as ‘rows and rows of prison cells’, their net curtains stained carbon-monoxide grey.
This road has chalked up quite a death rate since it was opened, somewhere in excess of the Falklands War and the Afghanistan campaign combined – all in the pursuit of pushing London further westwards. Even in the 1940s the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Mr H. Alker Tripp, described road death rates in London as having reached ‘battle level’ – and he said that during the Second World War.
Gordon S. Maxwell proposed his own radical solution – ‘Hang a motorist for murder!’ He justified this position by pointing out that within ten years of the opening of the new Great West Road, drivers had killed more people than the highwaymen had managed in over 200 years. At this stage I’m tempted to follow his line of reasoning. ‘A gibbet, duly loaded, by the side of the Great West Road to-day would be more effective, I think, in stopping these murderers than some quite inadequate fine.’ With the speeds of modern drivers they would barely register the dangling