Brentford

Brentford

Brentford, Kew Gardens

What to see
You’ll find accounts of local tourist attractions in Towns of Two Halves (and of 91 other places: order the book now for £8 from info@townsof2halves.co.uk). London’s tourist attractions are well covered in Visit London, Lonely Planet and Time Out.

‘This is a pneumatic device and someone has to pump the bellows’

Links to places near Griffin Park are:
Kew Gardens
London Museum of Water & Steam
Musical Museum
Syon Park

Towns of Two Halves extracts:
“Asked to name a waterside London football club, most people would say: ‘Fulham.’ Strictly speaking they would be right, but you could make a decent case for Brentford too. The new Community Stadium is barely a quarter of a mile from the Thames. That puts the magnificent parks of Syon and Kew Gardens within easy reach, too. In other words Brentford, an unassuming corner of West London, is in a pretty smart neighbourhood.”
“A good way to approach Brentford, at any time of year, would be to take the London Overground to Kew Gardens. The station at Kew Gardens is a strange, exotic place, like an orchid in Transport for London’s crop of dandelions.”
“Some museums can be a bit dry; not the Museum of Water & Steam. The opening gallery introduces Thomas Crapper at an early stage and doesn’t look back… In one drawing captioned ‘Before and after Cholera’ a pretty apple-cheeked maid becomes a grey-faced invalid. In another, Death rows casually along the Thames.”
These are taken from the Brentford chapter of Towns of Two Halves, published in 2018. To buy a copy, email info@townsof2halves.co.uk.

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