Twickenham Riverside – December 1988
I was teaching on Tuesday 13th December 1988, and together with a colleague took a group of photography students from the college to Twickenham, possibly to view an exhibition at the Orleans House Gallery, or perhaps just as a photographic outing.
My first thought when I looked at the contact sheet today was that it could be for the show I helped to organise there in 1988, city news urban blues…. It had been an interesting show, with images from ten of us who were part of a group called Framework, each showing their own group of pictures – those exhibiting were Carol Hudson, Peter Jennings, Terry King, myself, Tony Mayne, Derek Ridgers, John RJ Taylor, Laurence Ward, Randall Webb and Anton Williams. Terry was the main organiser and I worked with him to keep the group running.
But on checking I find that show was rather earlier in the year and I think we were just taking college students to a reasonably safe and interesting area a short train journey away where they could first be taken for a walk to suitable locations around the riverside and parks and then be left to work unsupervised taking pictures while their tutors probably took a lunch hour rest in a riverside pub.
It was surprisingly difficult to get some students to actually take photographs, so we arranged outings such as this where we would provide a suitable location and brief to make sure even they had some material to work with in the darkroom. They were all required to make at least 36 exposures so they had a film (black and white of course) to develop and make prints. Some students made sure they had time to get to a pub too, though there were enough in Twickenham for them to avoid the same as their two tutors.
But I did take some pictures myself during the outing, and here are a few of them. I took two versions of this image, looking upriver from the west end of the Embankment, one with the new Minox GTE and the second I think with a Leica M5 using the 35mm Summilux f1.4 lens. The image above is with the Minox, which had a MC Minoxar 35mm/2.8 lens and is just a little sharper, though the difference might well be in the exact focus distance chosen. But though the Minox was incredibly small and light – the smallest 35mm full-frame camera ever made, it could deliver exceptional results.
You can still launch boats at Twickenham, where at the junction of Church Land and Riverside a roadway leads down into the river. When the tide is low you can walk down this and get a view downriver. On the right boats are moored by Eel Pie Island and in the centre of the image you can just see Richmond Hill between the trees.
And although there is a footbridge across to Eel Pie Island as shown in the top image of this post, residents still need to keep tide tables handy, as the Twickenham Embankment end of the bridge still floods on those days when the moon aligns with the sun at full and new moon to give Spring Tides.
The balustrade is around what is now Champion’s Wharf Play Beach, and the wall is around the end of the riverside section of York House Gardens and a part of the archway leading through to this is just visible. The previous picture showed the narrow sloping pebbles above the waterline which I walked out on to take this picture.
Surprisingly I don’t appear on this occasion to have walked through York House Gardens and didn’t photograph the ‘Naked Ladies’ or Italian Fountain just through that gateway and on the left, but continued along Riverside, taking a few pictures of the houses beside it before reaching the splendid building of the White Swan pub.
You can now drink The Naked Ladies, the bestselling beer produced by Twickenham Brewery, a 4.4% golden ale made with Herkules, Celeia and Chinook hops and CAMRA’s 2019 Champion Golden Ale of London. But the brewery only opened in 2004, and Naked Ladies was first launched in 2013, so I can’t recall if or what I drank there in 1988. But I have enjoyed it at the White Swan and elsewhere more recently.
Before going in a pub we did go down to the riverside a little along from the White Swan, and I made several pictures of this boat covered in vegetation. Apart from this it seemed in quite usable condition and was still firmly moored. The Thames here is still tidal, though the Richmond half-lock downstream stops the water entirely flowing out.
A second picture in much the same area shows a smaller boat in rather cleaner condition, firmly moored and roped down on the mud. In the background at right is the white house on the corner of Lebanon Park and Riverside. This is where Twickenham Ferry used to run across the Thames to Ham House, passing just downstream of Eel Pie Island.
The ferry was licensed by the owners of Ham House, the Dysart family (and sometimes known as Dysart’s Ferry) and the first written mention of it was in 1652. I last went across with my father to see Ham House in the mid-1970s, not long before it ceased operation. There had for some years been a dispute about its right of way on this slipway. I took the photograph below in 1979 when the river was flooded and there were boats moored there which were those used for the ferry in better weather to row people across and there were still notices for waiting passengers still on the fence.
My contact sheet from December 1988 shows we walked further on, with pictures of moored boats close to where the still operational Hammerton’s Ferry, a Johnny-come-lately from 1908, still runs when weather and water conditions allow. An on one of these frames (not digitised) a small figure by the water’s edge stands taking a photograph, with the balding head of my teaching colleague, another Peter. This was where I made my final image of the day, after which I strongly suspect we made our way back towards a riverside pub before meeting our students for the train back to college.