Venues in Brentford

Brentford stands at the ford that named it, where the River Brent and the Grand Union Canal meet the Thames opposite Kew. It was a market town on the road west out of London long before it was part of the city, and the canal basin at its centre still reads as working water rather than ornament. A mile upstream, Syon began as a Bridgettine abbey founded in 1415, which inside a century had become one of the most influential religious houses in England and one of the last to be dissolved; in 1539 much of its community chose exile together.

The estate passed by marriage to Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, in 1594, and it has been the family’s London seat since. The Earl was implicated in the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and spent seventeen years in the Tower; royalist forces marched past the park to the battle of Brentford in 1642; and in 1647 the three younger royal children were held here, visited by their father from his captivity at Hampton Court. In 1750 the estates passed to Hugh and Elizabeth, the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland.

They are the reason an event comes to Syon. They commissioned Robert Adam to make a series of classical interiors filled with antiquities shipped from Italy, under an instruction to build a palace of Graeco-Roman splendour; unable to alter the layout he inherited, Adam worked the effect out of architecture instead, in the marble Great Hall, the gilded Ante Room and the Long Gallery. Capability Brown laid out the park and the lake around them, since restored to its eighteenth-century line. The Great Conservatory came later, its cast-iron frame carrying an area of glass nothing before it had managed; by 1833 a German visitor was struck by the gigantic exotic trees standing outside it in the open air. For access, Syon Lane and Brentford are on South Western Railway and Gunnersbury serves the District line and the Overground.