The road the offices are on
The Great West Road was opened in 1925 as a bypass, a way of getting traffic round Brentford's narrow and permanently jammed High Street. Within a few years its verges had filled with factories, many of them built with grand Art Deco frontages facing the traffic like advertisements, and the stretch through Brentford and Isleworth picked up the name it still carries: the Golden Mile.
Some of those buildings survive, the Gillette clock tower at the corner of Syon Lane among them. Others are gone, most famously the Firestone factory, demolished over a bank holiday weekend in 1980 just before it could be protected. In their place, and among them, stand the glass head offices that bring people here now, for a meeting, a project or a week of training that turns into several.
The problem every visitor discovers by the second evening is simple. At six o'clock the Golden Mile empties. The car parks clear, the dual carriageway roars on, and anybody staying on the road itself has nowhere to walk to and nothing to do except eat in the hotel again.
Three places to sleep, and what each one is like to come back to
One of them stands on the Great West Road among the offices. It is the shortest possible commute, which is a real advantage on the first morning of a week, and on the fourth evening it is the thing most guests would change. Step out of the door after dark and you are on the edge of a dual carriageway, a long way from anything that feels like a town.
Another is on Commerce Road, beside the Grand Union Canal where it steps down through the locks towards the Thames. The rooms on the canal side look over the water and the moored boats rather than the road, and it is worth asking for one at the time of booking, not at check in. From the door you are a couple of minutes from the High Street and the towpath.
The third is on the High Street at the Kew Bridge end, close to Kew Bridge station, the river and the football stadium. It is simple and reliable and well placed for evenings, with the one caveat that on a home match night the whole neighbourhood is loud until late. Check the fixtures before you book the dates.
Why a room by the lock beats one at a terminal
Plenty of people working on the Golden Mile are booked into airport hotels by a travel department that sees the word Heathrow and stops reading. A terminal hotel is designed for one night between two flights. For a week it means a shuttle bus, the Bath Road at rush hour twice a day, and evenings spent in a building whose only neighbours are car parks and other hotels.
A room in Brentford turns the same week inside out. The drive to the offices is short, and the evenings have somewhere to go: the towpath, the river, a High Street with pubs on it, trains into Waterloo if a night in town appeals, and Kew just across the bridge. By Wednesday that difference is worth more than any number of stars on the door.
Eating through the week
A working week wants variety more than it wants one brilliant restaurant. A sensible pattern: the first night near the hotel, because the first night is always tired. The second somewhere with character, and the three surviving pubs on the corners of the old football ground are ideal for that; the guide to Griffin Park's corner pubs sets out which to start in. The third across Kew Bridge, where the green at Kew and the riverside at Strand on the Green offer a completely different mood a short walk from the High Street.
The fourth night can go further. Isleworth, with its riverside pubs by the church, is a short drive or a pleasant walk, and the cooking in the small places of Twickenham is a quarter of an hour by car. By the fifth night most people are happy to eat simply and early and be in bed with the week behind them.
Book ahead for anything by the water on a warm evening, and remember that match nights change everything within half a mile of the stadium.
Switching off after the meetings
The quickest cure for a long day in a glass office is ten minutes of water. From the lock the canal towpath runs north towards Boston Manor, green and quiet within a few hundred yards, or south past the moored boats to the point where the canal meets the Thames. Either way, twenty minutes of walking puts the day a long way behind you.
If the week runs into a Saturday, Brentford has more to offer than a visitor expects. Brentford's Musical Museum keeps an extraordinary collection of self playing instruments and a cinema organ. The London Museum of Water and Steam by Kew Bridge keeps its Victorian pumping engines, some of which run on particular days. And Boston Manor House, a Jacobean mansion with a park beside it, is a short walk north. Check opening days for all three before building a plan round them.
The same companion for several evenings
The booking designed for exactly this situation is a week of evenings in TW: several evenings with one companion, all settled in a single exchange with Iris before you land instead of being arranged night by night from the hotel. Each evening is priced on the ladder by its own length, so three hours is £700 and a four hour dinner £900, whatever night it falls on. Each evening's fee goes to her in person as that evening begins.
The advantage is continuity. By the second evening there is no introduction to get through and no small talk to repeat, and by the third she knows which of your colleagues you are complaining about. Violetta, anchored at the Isleworth end of the Great West Road, prefers long bookings and is the natural choice for a week; she is on the thirties page. Patricia is based in Brentford and likes an evening screening followed by dinner by the lock. Tina, three minutes from Brentford station, suits an afternoon start on a lighter day.
Tell Iris the dates, the hotel and roughly how your days run, and she will build the evenings round the companion's diary and your meetings. Guests working at the Osterley end of the road can use exactly the same arrangement.
Filed under: most of the names in this note also sit on the statuesque shortlist in the panel.