Bees have already shown impressive survival instincts
DEPRESSING times on my high street, where locals have been up in arms at the closure of Barclays, the last bank to shutter its branch in the area.
The decision follows the loss of the post office – literally in this case, the building demolished to clear the way for yet more blocks of flats. The
Morrisons, constantly facing an uncertain future, clings on.
Nothing unusual here, my home being suburban outer London where estate agents and chicken shops thrive but other businesses appear in terminal decline.
There is another exception though. Just days before Barclays shut its doors for the final time in May, our local football club banked the biggest cheque in its history by winning the Championship play-off final at Wembley Stadium.
Brentford may be a seemingly unremarkable place, down by the Thames in a sleepy corner of the London Borough of Hounslow, but Brentford FC are putting it on the map.
Tonight, the Bees host Arsenal in their first top-flight game since 1947. A club built on solid foundations, with innovative leadership and a long-term sustainable plan, even if they don’t stay up this season, the wait to return is likely to be considerably shorter next time.
The banks may be moving on, but this is one local business determined to invest in its community. This summer the bulldozers which recently flattened one side of the high street moved on Griffin Park. The football ground once famous for having a pub on every corner no longer has corners.
But three of the pubs survive and, thanks to the location of Brentford’s new stadium, are likely to be around for a while yet. Because when a short flight to a new home near Heathrow might have been the easier option, the Bees moved just down the road. A switch 20 years in the making, the Brentford Community Stadium – which the Bees moved into at the start of last season, but which finally gets to open properly to fans to league football this evening – may lack the history, warmth and charisma of Griffin Park but it’s just a 15-minute walk from The New Inn, The Griffin and The Brook, the kind of distances that will ensure it remains in the fabric of a community that sorely needs it. To many neutrals, the plaudits thrown the way of owner Matthew Benham, coach Thomas Frank and their promising squad is already a bit much. To fans of local rivals QPR, Brentford will always be ‘just a bus stop in Hounslow’, to others an unknown name in an estate agents window. But this season, thousands of visitors and millions of armchair fans get the chance to learn what us locals have known all along. As a marketing slogan once put it with superb simplicity, Brentford is Brilliant.