Where Should the Brentford Fountain Be?
Brentford Voice collate the views of the local community
Brentford Fountain at its original site, c1970
In February Brentford Voice asked for the community’s views on whether, after 46 years, the Brentford Fountain should come home and where it should be located. Similar requests were made through local Facebook groups: Brentford Voice, Brentford Today and TV, The Brentford and Chiswick Appreciation Society, Brentford Friends, and Friends of St. Paul's Recreation Ground.
We have been hugely heartened and impressed by the scale of the response and by the extent to which people in the local community clearly care passionately about their heritage. A total of 140 local people have provided comments and suggestions and all but two were very positive: one simply said “yawn” while another expressed concern that the Fountain would become a repository for litter. In the interests of objectivity we will classify these comments as “undecided”.
Many individuals made more than one comment while the Facebook sites have received a total of 300 “likes”.
Not everyone provided suggestions for where the Fountain should be located in Brentford, while several provided more than one suggestion. At present the “league table” for suggested locations is as follows:
| Adjacent to St. Lawrence’s Church/ Augustus Close | 22 |
| Waterman’s Park | 20 |
| Market Place | 12 |
| Close to original site on northern approach to Kew Bridge | 12 |
| Within the development south of the High Street | 12 |
| Within the Brentford Community Stadium Development | 8 |
| St. George site at Kew Bridge (Kew Gate) | 5 |
| Brentford Fountain Leisure Centre | 5 |
| Goddard’s corner | 5 |
| The Butts | 4 |
| On grassed area to north of High Street and east of Macdonald's | 3 |
| Other | 15 |
Please note that a site at Waterman’s Park is, for very good reasons, very unlikely to be practicable.
The Fountain is, by fountain standards, a magnificently large and imposing structure measuring 8.5 metres high and 6.4 metres across at its base.
We even have a good suggestion for a campaign song (with credits to the Lightning Seeds):
“It’s coming home
It’s coming home
It’s coming
Brentford Fountain’s coming home...”
Please continue to email your thoughts to info@brentfordvoice.co.uk or post them on the BrentfordTW8.com Forum. You can also post your comments on the Facebook sites detailed above. Please spread the word with friends and relatives. Numbers do matter!
Together we will bring the Brentford Fountain home!
If you’d like to know more about Brentford Voice visit Brentfordvoice.co.uk/ or subscribe to the newsletter at brentfordvoice.co.uk/newsletter
March 11, 2020