One of west London's most important roads is 100 years old today, the Brentford By-Pass or as it's better known the Great West Road. Hounslow council are making a big thing of it.
The new dual carriageway swept through fields and parkland to the north of Brentford and Hounslow, starting where the Chiswick Roundabout is today and ending eight miles away in East Bedfont. Brentford High Street had long been an appalling bottleneck for westbound traffic and planners recognised that the increasing popularity of the motor car was only going to make congestion worse. The new road was duly opened on the afternoon of Saturday 30th May 1925 by King George and Queen Mary who joined local dignitaries in walking along a short stretch and making speeches. You can see a few photos of the event here, here, here and here. This is what the Middlesex County Council spokesman had to say...
The final section to open was the eastern end between Syon Lane and Chiswick which includes the section now known as the Golden Mile. Businesses flocked to this part of the new road, attracted by excellent connectivity and plenty of space, building factories that very much reflected the aesthetic of the day. One of these was the Gillette Factory, a landmark Art Deco building on the corner of Syon Lane whose lofty brick tower is topped by four neon clocks that can be seen for miles around. Not only was this Gillette's European headquarters but also their chief UK factory for the manufacture of razor blades, at least until 2006 when production moved to Poland and the place emptied out.
The Gillette Factory endured several vacant years while investors decided no, arterial Brentford wasn't a great location for a luxury hotel, then creative types moved in and filmed a few low-key productions for lesser-watched streaming channels. It's recently been decided that the premises should become a full-on six-stage film studios, indeed Hounslow council are very keen, plus it makes sense because the site stretches all the way back to the rainbow-topped headquarters of Sky TV. When I came to walk the Golden Mile earlier this week I was pleased to see the scaffolding had been removed from the clocktower, the outer brickwork had been scrubbed up and that the cherubic lamps around the perimeter still glow. I wasn't impressed by much else though.
Alas only a few buildings from the Golden age of the Great West Road survive. There's the Coty Cosmetics factory at number 941, a squat block with white walls and strip windows which looks like it could have been a 1930s air terminal, but which is now occupied by a tech-heavy private health clinic. There's the Pyrene building at number 981, designed for a fire extinguisher company by the same group of architects who conjured up the glorious Hoover Building in Perivale. It's very white and very long with a thin central tower, and is now an office block substantially occupied by students on skills-based courses who cluster on the elegant front steps for a vape. And there's also the former Currys head office at number 991, another sleek white beauty with flag-topped clocktower, which since 2000 has been home to outdoor ad agency JCDecaux. Their name was in the corner of the digital billboard in my first photo, if you noticed.
But most of the rest of the buildings hereabouts are architectural horrors, or at best bland, of the kind you'd expect to find along many an out-of-town dual carriageway. A Renault dealership sealed inside a metal cuboid. A Carpetright shed with ample parking. Storage depots with all the elan of a bingo hall. Several monstrous 80s office blocks that are predominantly hubris and glass. There's even a Currys outlet, almost bang opposite where their HQ used to be, where access for vehicles is between the proud gateposts of a former Art Deco behemoth, the much missed Firestone Tyre Factory. Of all the buildings along the Golden Mile the Firestone was by far the longest, fronting a 26 acre site, but also the most rapidly undone. When the business closed in 1979 the new owners exchanged contracts on a Friday, then sneakily demolished the ornate frontage on the Saturday before a civil servant could get round to signing a preservation order. On the positive side this triggered the 20th Century Society to campaign more vigorously for the preservation of modern buildings, and on the downside the bastards totally got away with it.
In 2025 the Firestone building is being replaced again, this time by "A New Iconic HQ Distribution/Logistics Warehouse". The architects have at least gone for an Art Deco-inspired design solution, although the artist's impression looks more slatted plastic than iconic glass and the currently reality is a half-clad functional lattice. If it improves the backdrop to the Firestone's surviving front gates and chunky lanterns, however, good luck to it. The really big redevelopment story along the Golden Mile is currently the transformation of GlaxoSmithKline's enormous ex-HQ, a futuristic upthrust which opened in 2002 on a landscaped site beside the Grand Union Canal. All the staff moved back to central London last year and the latest plans foresee a "housing-led mixed-use redevelopment" of tightly-packed polygonal towers, one 25 storeys high, delivering upwards of 2000 new homes. It's by no means the first Golden Mile site to pivot to boxy residential and it won't be the last.
The best way to see the Golden Mile thus isn't really on foot because the surviving treats are too sparsely spread, it's from the road itself. I recommend boarding the road's bespoke red double decker, the H91, a route which conveniently runs along five miles of the Great West Road from Gunnersbury to Hounslow. For the first mile the M4 shadows the A4, quite literally, passing directly overhead on a four lane viaduct supported by an sequence of chunky concrete pillars. Only on reaching Brentford does the motorway veer off, bombarded by elevated advertisements, leaving the way clear down below to enjoy what remaining treats the Golden Mile has left.
At Syon Lane the frantic commercial vibe abruptly changes, this because the Church Commissioners owned all the land west of here and permitted only housing rather than factories. The A4 thus rushes ahead through acres of interwar suburbia fronted by a nigh unbroken line of gabled semis, occasionally punctuated by Tudorbethan shopping parades and sports facilities. You see it all from the top deck of the H91, the endless ribbon development, the long chains of street trees, the budget hotels where pubs used to be, the peculiarly thin tower at Osterley station, the planes on Heathrow approach and the very necessary subways for nipping from one side to the other. It's not the ideal environment in which to live but it is much better to build along a new road than to bludgeon a dual carriageway through existing neighbourhoods... which is exactly what King George said in his opening speech 100 years ago today.
To celebrate the 100th birthday of the Great West Road an anniversary website has been set up at goldenmile.london including historical links and modern stories. It is perhaps a tad commercial, overplaying the interest anyone might have in bold redevelopment visions and Brentford's vibrant cuisine, but it does include details of a number of special commemorative events. Chief amongst these are a GM100 Public Exhibition at Boston Manor Park this weekend (10am-4pm Sat, Sun; free entry) and a Classic Car Cavalcade departing Boston Manor Road at noon tomorrow before heading to Gillette Corner. Later chances to look inside some of the Art Deco treasures appear to be sold out, but all the good bits are in a new illustrated book The Great West Road: A Centenary History written by James Marshall and purchasable from the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society.
The road that unchoked Brentford and transformed Hounslow, the Great West Road, is thankfully 100 years old today.
