Brentford is styled the county town of Middlesex, but has little honour in its own country; and if its two fabulous kings were content to sit here on one throne, the County Council prefers a more dignified seat at Westminster. Like Washington or Ottawa, indeed, it seems to be an artificial capital, originally having no rank but as dependency of the adjoining parishes of Ealing and Hanwell. This dirty place, besides bearing an old bad name for bear-baitings, election riots, and the like disorders, has been a butt for metropolitan poets ever since Falstaff was disguised and drubbed as the fat witch of Brentford. The author of the Rehearsal made it the scene for his burlesque. Johnson satirically coupled its name with Glasgow, in which he showed his ignorance, as all travellers of that century insist on the neatness and prettiness of the Clyde city before its days of grimy wealth. Thomson, in his Castle of Indolence, takes this “town of mud” to be a fit stage for pig-driving, where motor-cars now “gruntle to each other’s moan”; Goldsmith unkindly suggests it as goal for a race between “a turnip-cart, a dust-cart, and a dung-cart”; and other contemporary bards affect the same nose-holding attitude towards poor Brentford, their complaints, as a certain guide-book dryly says, being in our day echoed by sanitary inspectors. Of late the squalid county seat shows grace to be somewhat ashamed of itself, and has a scheme in view for sweeping and garnishing. Let us hurry through its show of gas-works, chimney-stacks, dingy wharves and slums about the mouth of the Brent, only noticing that at the Church and the Town Hall, near the bridge, the place attains a certain point of quaint ugliness not without attraction, and that its squalid waterside features set in relief the blooming of Kew Gardens across the Thames. There are some pleasanter aspects to the right, where, by Old Brentford and Boston House, the town begins to merge with the spreading outskirts of Ealing; but as to New Brentford, as it once was, its motto should be Guarda e passa.
When the road has crossed the Brent it passes, on the left side, the noble demesne of Syon House, which the tram-traveller might flit by unawares but for an ornate gate revealing the grounds. From a right-of-way crossing the park to Isleworth Church on the river bank, can be had a fuller view of the mansion, crowned by that lion so long familiar to Londoners over Northumberland House, there said, on some such authority as that local worthy, the late Mr. Joe Miller’s,
to wag its tail whenever it heard noon struck at Westminster. This stately structure, rebuilt by the Adams, had been a rich nunnery “conveyed” to the Lord Protector Somerset, and is now a seat of the Dukes of Northumberland. The community of nuns long held out at Lisbon, keeping the keys of their English home; but when, a century ago, they showed them to the Duke of that day, he is understood to have bluntly remarked that the locks had been altered. Another treasure of these nuns has been brought back to their native country—the famous Syon Cope, an elaborate specimen of mediæval embroidery now preserved at South Kensington Museum.
On the other side of the road one may turn up to the Earl of Jersey’s Osterley Park, first enclosed by Sir Thomas Gresham of City renown, the house rebuilt for Childs the bankers. The park extends over a well timbered and watered flat which Horace Walpole called the ugliest in the world; but that in our day seems a slander. By a road through it, or round its precinct, one can reach the villages of Norwood Green and Heston, where Middlesex does not want its common beauty of groves and gardens. This would be a cyclist’s or pedestrian’s pleasantest way on to beyond Hounslow, for the highroad, skirting Isleworth, has not much to say for itself.
Nor is there much to be said for Hounslow when we get there—a long, unlovely town, its brightest spots of colour the uniforms of soldiers quartered at its barracks or in a camp beside the Crane. Hounslow Heath has been used for many camps, and it had once an ill name as headquarters of knights of the road, whose prowess made the journey to Bath an adventure; but there is little trace of its wildness now. It seems to be all enclosed, except the plain to the left occupied by that permanent camp, with its fortification of barbed wire. This was the scene of an interesting experiment made in training a company of young soldiers, at the expense of the Spectator and its readers. Besides the preparation of food for powder, another industry of the neighbourhood is the powder-mills to be found along the course of the Crane, locally known as the Powder Mill River; but they are naturally of a retiring disposition.