There are approximately 190 islands of varying sizes, inhabited and uninhabited, in the River Thames; this article concentrates on the two in the parish of Chiswick. The first lies close to the bank in old Chiswick village, whilst the latter sits proudly in the middle of the Thames at Strand-on-the-Green, in plain view of thousands of visitors to this beautiful stretch of the river.

Chiswick Eyot
For those who consider the Estuary is not part of the actual river, Chiswick Eyot is often referred to as the first island in the Thames. This narrow uninhabited island lies opposite Chiswick Mall with its elegant Georgian and Regency houses and their beautifully manicured riverside gardens. It is approximately 300 metres in length, and is a well known landmark on the Boat Race course picked out by the aerial television coverage of the race, and the tall green pole just off the upstream end of the island is used as a marker by the rowers. Others may know Chiswick Eyot from the marvellous 1953 abstract painting of the island, called The View from St Nicholas’s Churchyard, by John Trevelyan, that hangs in the Tate Britain Gallery.

The island covers an area of almost four acres, and is separated from the mainland by a narrow channel. It is most easily accessible from the drawdock at the bottom of Chiswick Lane. In fact, it stands so enticingly near the riverbank, that at low tide people often take the opportunity to walk across and explore the dense interior. Centuries ago the island was much larger than it is today, and it appears to have been a place of early human settlement with flint tools and pottery being found, dating from the Neolithic period (around 4,500 to 2,300 BC). Roman spearheads and knives and the pommel of a Saxon sword have also been found, and at a later period the  island was a camping place for Danish raiders. Over time, the area around Chiswick Eyot developed as a fishing village, as well as becoming a fashionable residential area.

Like many riverside folk, the Chiswick fishermen supplemented their income by harvesting osier willows. The island’s willows were also harvested by itinerant osier cutters who travelled the Thames with their small coracle-like rafts upon which they floated their load to the bank to avoid carrying it across the mud. Since the mid-18th century the island had been a centre for the growing of three types of osiers: the yellow willow, the almond-leaved willow and the osier willow, and these were said to be the finest on the Thames. Osier cutting took place in January, when the willow shoots were dried and stacked in bundles ready to be sold to make baskets for the nearby market gardens. Fresh rods were then planted in February. The smaller osier rods were used for making crayfish pots. In spring the grass that grew amongst the osier stumps was cut for sale to tradesmen with horse-drawn carts to feed their animals. During the Great Exhibition of 1851, demand for milk was high because of the large numbers of visitors drawn to London, thus the Eyot’s grass fetched high prices from the keepers of stable-fed cows. The whetstone upon which the Chiswick osier cutters sharpened their knives was donated to Gunnersbury Park Museum. At one time it was placed next to the entrance of the Red Lion pub (now a private house where residents report sensing ghostly presences) in Chiswick Mall, and at another period it was in the White Bear and Whetstone, a pub long since vanished, which stood on the corner of Chiswick Lane
and the Mall.

At the end of the 19th century Chiswick Eyot was entirely covered in osier willows with just one solitary small tree at the tip of its upstream end. By 1920 the little tree had grown but still stood in splendid isolation. The cultivation of the island as a commercial osier bed continued until 1935, and regular cutting of the willows ceased after the Second World War. From then on the island began to grow wild. A photograph taken in 1961 shows the island still with its osiers but they were now overgrown and in more of a patchwork interspersed with open clearings. Yet the lonely tree was still there, larger and with a bulbous trunk. There used to be a ditch bisecting the island, which marked the boundary between the parishes of Chiswick and Hammersmith, but now the ditch and the Hammersmith portion of the island have totally disappeared.

Looking at its recent history, it is miraculous that this little island has survived at all. Over the centuries it has suffered from severe erosion, accelerated by its position on the outside of a large northward loop of the Thames, and by the sharp increase in larger and faster river traffic during the first half of the 20th century. In Jacob Knyff’s painting of Chiswick from the River (circa 1676–80) in the Museum of London there is a string of smaller eyots running upstream of today’s eyot almost to Corney House. These were also osier beds but had disappeared by the time of Samuel Leigh’s 1830 Panorama of the Thames. In the Panorama the island appears about 400 metres long, but by 1950 its eastern tip had disappeared completely below water, and it measured little more than the 300 metres we see today. By the late 1950s the island was disappearing so fast that the Old Chiswick Protection Society persuaded Brentford and Chiswick Council to try and halt erosion at the western end with timber camp-shedding and tons of shingle. Yet this was not enough protection, and in 1978 Hounslow Council considered removing the entire island because debris from its eroding banks was becoming a dangerous nuisance to boats using the Thames. Local protests, however, persuaded the Council to preserve the island, and conservation groups and volunteers helped restore the Eyot. Later both ends of the island were reinforced with large concrete blocks, and in 1993 the London Borough of Hounslow declared the island a Local Nature Reserve. If it had not been protected from the tides, the island, like so many others in this stretch of the Thames, would almost certainly have disappeared.

The island is still well-maintained, and every two years volunteers pollard the osiers and clear any debris. It is pleasing to know that periodically some modern basket makers still come here to cut osier rods for their craft. Chiswick Eyot is unique amongst the Thames islands because it is the only one that is still predominantly a working osier bed. The fact that this rural activity survives here is particularly interesting, given that the island is the closest one to central London. If a visitor is prepared to squelch across the mud at low tide, they will be immensely rewarded by this lovely island with its little shingle beach, so perfect for a summer picnic, and the marvellous views downstream towards urban Hammersmith and upstream to leafy Kew. Although it is neither scenically particularly attractive, nor especially important historically, this little eyot has always been my favourite Thames island. It was here in the late 1960s and early 70s that my cousin Chris and I spent many happy summers, swimming off the little pebbly beach and building secret camps in our very own ‘Mekong Delta’. During school holidays, on her way to work, my mother would drop us off at the island with our sandwiches and drinks and pick us up on her way home. We had to sit on towels in the back of the car because we were usually still wet from the river and the car always smelled of Thames mud. In fact the seeds of my book on the Thames islands were sown during those long gone days.

Oliver’s Eyot
From Chiswick the river loops round to Mortlake Reach and on up past Kew Railway Bridge to Oliver’s Eyot. This sizeable uninhabited island, which is much higher than Chiswick Eyot, is approximately 100 metres long and 20 metres wide. It enjoys a striking site positioned as it is in the very centre of the river. In medieval times the fishermen laid fish traps in the shallower channel between the island and the Strand bank. The island used to be called Strand Eyot, as it lies directly opposite the popular Strand-on-the-Green, a former Thames fishing village now fronted by elegant, very expensive Georgian and Regency houses interspersed with what were once humble cottages. It is only accessible by boat, although at low tide, providing you don’t mind getting impossibly wet and muddy, it is sometimes possible to wade through the small channel of water onto the island. In marked contrast to the relative flatness of Chiswick Eyot, Oliver’s Eyot is much higher. Aside from Chiswick Eyot, the tidal Thames islands stand noticeably higher above water level than the nontidal islands. This is due to the large scale dumping of waste material upon the islands over the past three and half centuries. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, stone from Oxfordshire was brought down river in barges for the re-building of the city. On their return, the barges carried rubble to be dumped on the islands. Later, in the 19th century, during the huge excavations for the London underground and sewage systems, thousands of tons of rubble and soil were also dumped on the islands nearest to central London. This gave the islands solid foundations, and raised them high enough to eliminate the danger of flooding and erosion. Chiswick Eyot escaped being dumped upon because it was always a profitable working osier bed.

It is said that Oliver’s Eyot gained its current name because Oliver Cromwell reputedly took refuge there during the Civil War. There is said to be a tunnel linking it to the nearby Bull’s Head pub, where the myth has arisen that Cromwell used the pub as an intermittent headquarters. Local legend says that a woman betrayed him to Royalist forces and Cromwell escaped, probably through a tunnel, to the island in the middle of the river. This seems a highly improbable story – it is unlikely that Cromwell’s military duties ever brought him to this area, and although his daughter married Earl Fauconberg and they lived at Sutton Court, they did not move there until nearly 20 years after Cromwell’s death. The island was still known as Strand Eyot more than a century after the Civil War, and no evidence of a tunnel has ever been found. By the 19th century, however, the story had become so woven into local mythology that Strand Eyot became Oliver’s Eyot.

In 1778 the City of London’s Navigation Committee purchased the island for 60 guineas to use as a base for collecting tolls from the increasing barge traffic. A large wooden structure was built on the island to house a toll collector and a barge was moored alongside from which the tolls were taken from passing boats. The toll barge had previously been stationed at Fulham Bridge, before it was moved to the tail of Oliver’s Eyot. For safety the island was raised three feet and embanked at each end, giving it the height we see today. The pub directly in front of the island, The City Barge, which was formerly called the City Navigation Barge, probably takes its name from this toll barge, although the name could refer to the City of London’s ceremonial barge, the Maria Wood, which in the 19th century was usually berthed in an inlet on the Kew bank, opposite the island, during the winter months. By the 1820s, however, toll collection had ceased and the island was abandoned. In September 1826 the Clerk of Works reported the island was ‘at present nearly useless and resorted to by persons committing nuisances and destroying the building’. In 1857 the island was transferred to the Thames Conservancy Board, and by 1865 the Board had built a smithy to make and repair boat parts.

The centre of the island is quite eerie, being overshadowed by the dense canopy of trees, with the intermittent creaking sound of the ancient poplars. All around the ground are strewn the remains of the house which the City Corporation built for their collector when they first began levying tolls on the barge traffic in 1778, and then there are the remains of the old boat yard and the 1860s blacksmith’s forge that was demolished in 1990. Hidden in the undergrowth is a huge oblong stone plinth lying on its side with the year 1868 engraved on it, unfortunately the rest of the inscription is not legible. There is also a large boundary stone marking the boundary between a detached portion of the parish of Ealing and Old Brentford and the parish of Chiswick. Most of the island is covered by woodland, with several weeping willows on the southwest bank and three large Lombardy poplars in the centre of the island. Shrubs include hawthorn, dogwood and cherry as well as bamboo and other garden escapees, perhaps descendants from the old toll collector’s garden. Amongst the many species of typical Thames flora on the banks, can be found the pink water speedwell, which is a very rare species in London. The island is a valuable nesting site and refuge for wildfowl and a wide variety of woodland birds, including woodpeckers, but the classic birds of the island are Canada geese and cormorants, many of which can be seen sunning themselves from the island’s banks. In all, this is a hugely atmospheric island that due to its height and central position, greatly enhances, as well as dominates, the view of the river at this point.

Sources
C J Cornish The Naturalist on the Thames, 1902; David Pape Nature Conservation in Hounslow, 1990; F S Thacker The Thames Highway, Locks and Weirs, Vol II, 1920

Miranda Vickers grew up near the River Thames at Chiswick, and is the author of several books about the history of Albania, and of the forthcoming book Eyots and Aits – Islands of the River Thames to be published in May 2012 by The History Press.