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Brentford, Chiswick & Hammersmith – 2018

Friday, December 27th, 2024

Brentford, Chiswick & Hammersmith: On Thursday 27th December 2018 we still had a lot of Christmas excess to walk off despite having made our normal Boxing Day walk the day before. But we had followed that with a second Christmas dinner.

Brentford, Chiswick & Hammersmith - 2018 — *‘Rule Britannia’ on a boat moored below Thames Lock at Brentford*

This is still one of my favourite walks in West London and includes various stretches I’ve often walked over the years in one direction or the other, usually during the times of year when days are short and we don’t want to spend much time in travelling. And during the time between Boxing Day and New Year, rail travel is often something of a lottery with much of the network being shut down for engineering work.

Brentford locks were gauging locks so that tolls could be charged based on the weight of goods in barges. The flats here on a site between the River Brent and the canal have replaced large dockside sheds.

Even our short journey to Brentford was affected in 2018 and the usual direct train service to Brentford – our slow route to Waterloo – was not running. But we could take a train to Twickenham and go the rest of the way on the top deck of a bus, always one of the most interesting ways to travel in London. And the bus did take us more conveniently close to where I wanted to start this walk, at the bridge which takes Brentford High Street over the Grand Union Canal.

Brentford used to be a rather dirty downmarket industrial and commercial centre, with sheds and warehouses, factories, docks on the canal and where this enters the Thames, a thriving market, a large gas works and more. It has changed dramatically in the last 40 or so years with much of its river and canal sides now filled with luxury flats. Parts of the old Brentford remain but more and more is disappearing, including some things in these pictures I made in 2018. I’ve been there a few times since and it remains an interesting walk.

More on My London Diary at Brentford to Hammersmith. Here I’ll simply post a few images with captions from some of the key places along our route apart from the picture at the top of the post they follow roughly in the order I took them, though we did quite a bit of wandering around in Brentford.

*The River Brent from the footbridge over the weir.*

*Below Thames Lock the river comes back into the channel leading from the lock to the Thames.*

*A working boatyard at Dock Road on the River Brent*

*John’s Boat Works, Lot’s Ait with the bridge to it built in 2012*

*Hounslow Council and boat owners fought a long battle over the moorings at the gasworks site, but these boats were simply abandoned after the council’s victory.*

*Strand on the Green at low tide. It was warm enough to sit in the sun and eat our sandwiches*

*We walked through the gardens and out from the main gate to Chiswick House*

*The footpath to St Nicholas’s Church in Chiswick*

In Hammersmith we took the District line to Richmond and then a train back home to tackle some of the leftovers from our Christmas lunch.

More on My London Diary at Brentford to Hammersmith.

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Tags:2018, booatyard, Brentford, Chiswick, Chiswick House, gas works, Grand Union Canal, Hammersmith, Hammersmith Bridge, Hounslow Council, John's Boat Works, London, London Photos, Lot's Ait, low tide, moorings, peter Marshall, River Brent, River Thames, St Nicholas's Church, Strand-on-the-Green, Thames Lock, Walk, weir
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Chiswick House & Gardens – 1989

Saturday, November 9th, 2024

Chiswick House & Gardens: On Wednesday 1st November 1989 I took the train to Chiswick and walked around the gardens of Chiswick House, making a brief detour to the Thames at Chiswick Mall and then returning to the gardens and then walking back to the station.

*Obelisk, Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1989 89-10j-11*

It was a place we often took our photography students for a day’s outings early in their one or two year course, a public park where they could wander freely and safely with a brief to take pictures. The park is owned by the London Borough of Hounslow and surrounds the house and the gardens are open every day and free to enter, but English Heritage charge for entry to the house. We never took the students inside.

The obelisk was erected here in 1732, but the classical sculpture on the base is much older, and had been given to Lord Burlington in 1712. It was replaced by a copy in 2006, with the original now inside the house.

*Classic Bridge, Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1989 89-10j-14*

The gardens changed greatly over the years as Lord Burlington and his friend William Kent who had helped in design the house in a neo-Palladian style – completed in 1729 – put in their ideas. Kent later became largely responsible for the gardens, which are one of the earliest examples of a grand English landscape garden.

But this bridge only arrived after Burlington’s death in 1753, added in 1774 to the designs of James Wyatt for Georgiana Spencer, the wife of William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Devonshire who then owned the property. It is over the Bollo Brook which runs through the gardens and was used to fill its lakes and run fountains, but later became too polluted so was culverted under the lake to continue towards the Thames close to Chiswick Bridge.

The house was probably never a comfortable place to live, having been designed primarily as a place to show off the considerable classical purchases Burlington had acquire during his three ‘Grand Tours’ as a young man and to demonstrate his devotion to the architectural ideas of Andrea Palladio which had begun on his tour of the Venice region in 1719.

*Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1989 89-11a-53*

Development of the gardens continued under the Cavendish family, including the building of a 300ft long conservatory in 1813 for the cultivation of camelias, then incredibly expensive and thought to be tender plants – though they grow quite well in the icy winters of Japan and the Himalayas. A formal garden in an Italian style was built around it. But this formal arrangement of hedges dates from Burlingtons own plans for the garden with vistas and statuary and columns.

*Sphinx, Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1989 89-11a-43*

The Cavendish family let out the property to various tenants and in 1892 it became a mental hospital for wealthy patients, the Chiswick Asylum until 1929 when it was sold to Middlesex County Council. After war damage the house became run by the Ministry of Works in 1948, latter English Heritage and in 2005 they formed the Chiswick House and Gardens Trust with Hounslow Council to bring management of house and gardens together.

*Steps, Chiswick House, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1989 89-11b-66*

I’d visited the house and gardens at intervals over the years, often with my family, and by 1989 the gardens were in rather better shape having been rather let go a little wild in some earlier years. On Flickr there is a very different picture taken from more or less the same viewpoint in 1978, and you can also find more pictures from a visit with my family in 1984 and with students in 1988.

*Chiswick House, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1989 89-11b-51*

I think this is another classical relic in at the entrance front of the house.

Urn, Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1989 89-11b-55

An urn in a very formal garden area. The next frame on Flickr shows the entire urn. I also made a very similar image in colour.

*Urn, Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1989 89-11b-43*

During the day there I made over 60 black and white exposures of the house and gardens, but most were rather similar to pictures I had made in earlier years and so I haven’t bothered to digitise them.

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All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.

Tags:1989, Bollo Brook, Chiswick, Chiswick House, Chiswick House Gardens, Classic Bridge, classical sculpture, Georgiana Spencer, Grand Tours, Hounslow, London, London Borough of Hounslow, London Photos, neo-Palladian, obelisk, Palladio, peter Marshall, Sphinx, steps, urn
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Chiswick House & Gardens 1988

Wednesday, April 20th, 2022

Chiswick House & Gardens 1988

*Classic Bridge, Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1988 88-9b-56*

I think we managed to get most of our students together at Kew Bridge after our walk along Brentford Riverside to take the train for the single stop to Chiswick, from where we walked the third of a mile or so to Chiswick House Gardens.

*Sphinx, Chiswick House, Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1988 88-9b-35*

As it says on the web site, “Chiswick House and Gardens is one of the most glorious examples of 18th-century British architecture and landscaped gardens, with over 300 years of discovery, inspiration and delight.” The house and gardens were created between 1725 and about 1738 by William Kent working for his friend Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington and represent the birth of the English Landscape Movement and the house one of the finest examples of neo-Palladian architecture in England.

*Lion, Exedra, Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1988 88-9b-32*

I don’t think we told the students a great deal about this, but we had showed them some pictures before the outing, including some fine photographs by Bill Brandt and Edwin Smith, and perhaps even some of my own.

*Steps, Chiswick House, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1988 88-9b-14*

Over the years the grounds and the house had deteriorated and before it had been sold to Middlesex County Council in 1929 had been a mental health institution. The house was taken over by the Ministry of Works (now English Heritage) in 1948, and they embarked on a major project to restore both house and gardens to their original state.

*Bust, Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1988 88-9b-15*

The gardens at the time of our visit in 1988 were in parts rather less restored than they are now, and I think access was a little less restricted and we could wander freely around them. The park is open free of charge to the public every day and is well worth a visit. Back in 1988 there were relatively few visitors and apart from our group they were mainly locals walking their dogs. Now after another major restoration with £12m of national lottery money and a new café completed in 2012 it gets rather more visitors.

*Bust, Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1988 88-9b-16*

The café was the London Building of the year in 2011, and the ‘artisan’ food isn’t bad if you like that sort of thing, though back in 1988 we brought sandwiches.

*From Station footbridge, Burlington Lane, Chiswick, Hounslow, 1988 88-9c-63*

We didn’t get all of the students back to catch the train home from Chiswick station on any of the occasions we took them there. I think this may have been the year when police held two of them as they ran across the park to try and get to the train on time and held them for several hours without allowing them to contact anyone. But normally when we took students out some would disappear and go clubbing in London, coming back bleary-eyed to college the following morning to sleep in our lessons.

Tags:architecture, Chiswick, Chiswick House, Earl of Burlington, English Landscape Movement, Gardens, Hounslow, Lodnon, London Photos, neo-Palladian, peter Marshall, William Kent
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After Christmas – Brentford to Hammersmith

Tuesday, December 28th, 2021

After Christmas – Brentford to Hammersmith was one of our more interesting walks in London to walk off our Christmas excesses in recent years. For once I’m not sticking religiously to my usual practice and this was three years AND one day ago, and the four of us set out on 27th December 2018.

Often in recent years we’ve gone away in the period after Christmas to visit one of our sons and his family in Derbyshire, with some great walks in the areas around where they have lived, and there are pictures from these on My London Diary, but in 2018 my other son and his wife were staying with us and came for this walk.

Public transport in the period between Christmas and New Year is at best restricted and rather unreliable, and 2018 was no exception and this always limits our starting point. Even for this relatively local walk what would have been just a short direct train meant taking the train to Twickenham and then catching a local bus to Brentford. And on our return trip again a bus took us back to Twickenham for the train home. It meant less time for walking and we had to abandon the idea of actually going inside Chiswick House in order to complete the relatively short walk of 5-6 miles before it got dark.

Brentford, and particularly the Grand Union Canal where we began our walk is now very different from how I remember it – and indeed since I first went back to photograph it in the 1970s. Commercial traffic on the Grand Union came more or less to an end in the early 1970s. What was once canal docks and wharves by the lock where boats were gauged and tolls charged the sheds have been replaced by rather uglier flats and a small marina.

Walking by the canal towards its junction with the River Thames there are areas which still look much as they did years ago, and some rather more derelict than they were then. This is a side of Brentford invisible from the High Street but with much of interest. Probably in the next few years this too will disappear as gentrification advances.

Shortly before the lock leading to the Thames, the River Brent which is here combined with the canal runs over a weir to make its own way to the main river. There are still working boatyards in the area around here, though a little downstream more new flats and a part of the Thames Path here was closed and a short diversion was necessary.

We continued along past new riverside flats and a new private footbridge to the recently revivied boatyard on Lot’s Ait to an area of open space which was a part of the old gas works site, then along the riverside path past more new flats to Kew Bridge and Strand on the Green. Here it was warm enough to sit in the sun and eat our sandwiches before leaving the river to walk to Chiswick House Gardens.

I’d planned to get here for lunch, perhaps spending an hour or so going around the house and then perhaps a drink in the cafe, but there was no time thanks to the rail problems, so we briefly visited the toilets before heading on to St Nicholas’s Church and Chiswick riverside.

From there it was a straight walk by the river to Hammersmith Bridge, arriving around sunset with some fine views along the river – and then the short walk to the bus station for the bus back to Twickenham and the train home. The two bus journeys made our travel take much longer, but you do get some interesting views from the top deck of a double-decker and the journey was intereresting at least until it got too dark to see much.

More on the walk and many more pictures at Brentford to Hammersmith.

Tags:2018, After Christmas, boatyard, Brentford to Hammersmith, canal dock, Chiswick, Chiswick House, Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick Riverside, December, dock, flats, gas wroks, Grand Union Canal, Hammersmith, Hammersmith Bridge, Kew Bridge, lock, London, peter Marshall, River Brent, River Thames, sheds, St Nicholas, Strand-on-the-Green, weir
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Re-photo

Posts Tagged ‘Chiswick House’

Brentford, Chiswick & Hammersmith – 2018

Chiswick House & Gardens – 1989

Chiswick House & Gardens 1988

After Christmas – Brentford to Hammersmith

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