Brentford Poor Law Union formally came into existence on 30th June 1836. Its operation was overseen by an elected Board of Guardians, 24 in number, representing its 10 constituent parishes as listed below (figures in brackets indicate number of Guardians where this was more than one):
Middlesex: Acton (2), New Brentford (2), Chiswick (3), Ealing (5), Greenford, Hanwell, Heston (2), Isleworth (4), Perivale, Twickenham (3).
Later additions: West Twyford (from late 1836).
The population falling in the Union in 1831 had been 32,605 — ranging from Perivale (32) to Ealing (7,783). The average poor-rate expenditure for 1833-5 had been £13,779 or 8s.5d. per head of the population.
A new Brentford Union workhouse was built at Isleworth on the east side of Ickenham Road in 1837-8. It was designed by Lewis Vulliamy who was also the architect of workhouses for the Epping and Sturminster Unions. His design for Brentford was based on the model cruciform layout published by the Poor Law Commissioners.
In 1895-1902, the workhouse was totally rebuilt with an infirmary being erected on the site of the previous workhouse, and the new much larger workhouse placed to the south-east on land adjoining Brentford District School. The new buildings were based on a pavilion block layout to designs by WH Ward of Birmingham. The location and layout of the site is shown on the 1915 OS map:
Most of the buildings have now been demolished but two able-bodied accommodation pavilions survive at the south of the site.
The site is currently occupied by Hounslow and Spelthorne Mental Health Services.
The Riverside Village of Isleworth – Andrea Cameron
The original parish of All Saints, Isleworth, covered the riverside village, the hamlets of Worton, Brentford End and Wyke, plus all that part of Hounslow south of the Staines Road, High Street and London Road.
Isleworth has been a settlement for possibly four thousand years. The area once known as Old England, on the eastern borders of Syon Park and Brentford Dock, when excavated in 1928 revealed a Romano-British settlement. The excavation's leader was the late Sir Mortimer Wheeler and the finds can be seen in the Museum of London. They included the wooden basket-weave walls from huts, pots and metal hunting implements.
In the Domesday Survey of 1086, the entry for the Hundred of Honeslaw refers to the Manor of Gistlesworde, the derivation of this name possibly being Gislhere's enclosure. The entry refers to a priest living in the area, but makes no reference to a church. The Hundred included Twickenham, Whitton, Hounslow and Heston.
In 1231 Isleworth Manor was conveyed to Richard, Earl of Cornwall, the brother of King Henry III. Richard had a new Manor House containing a chapel built behind the present position of Lower Square. The site was excavated in the late 1980s by archaeologists from the Museum of London.
The first known church, dedicated to All Saints, of which the tower survives, dates from the late 14th century. In 1431 the Monastery of St Saviour and St Bridget of Syon of the order of St Augustine was built on the site of Syon House. The Bridgettine order of nuns originated in Sweden and arrived in England at the beginning of the 15th century to found an English branch. King Henry V granted them a site by the River Thames at St Margaret’s, where their first house was built in 1415; this site proving unsuitable, they moved to Syon. Syon Abbey was dissolved in 1539 on the orders of King Henry VIII and most of the monastic buildings were demolished, although Henry's fifth wife, Katherine Howard, was imprisoned there for three months in 1541-2. When Henry died in 1547 his body rested overnight in the chapel en route from London to Windsor for burial in St George's chapel.
The site was granted to Edward Seymour, first Duke of Somerset, who in 1548 had Syon House built. Somerset was later accused of treason - he played a leading part in the Lady Jane Grey affair - found guilty and beheaded on Tower Hill. Lady Jane Grey was offered the throne of England whilst living at Syon House. When Queen Mary I came to the throne she brought the nuns back to Syon as she still worshipped as a Catholic, but Queen Elizabeth I was a Protestant and when she came to the throne she sent the nuns packing once more. In 1594 Queen Elizabeth leased the Syon estate to Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland. King James I granted the freehold of Syon to the Earl as a thank you for supporting James' claim to the English throne. In the 18th century the Earldom was elevated to a Dukedom and the present Duke of Northumberland is the 12th in this line. The mid 18th century saw the interior of Syon House being redesigned by Robert Adam and the grounds being remodelled by Capability Brown.
Isleworth in the mid 17th century experienced some of the events of the English Civil War. In November 1642 Syon House was occupied by Royalist troops during the Battle of Brentford, and at the end of the war in 1647 Oliver Cromwell met there with the Parliamentarian Generals, some Lords and London Members of Parliament.
One hundred and forty-nine Isleworth residents died of the plague in 1665. An Isleworth churchyard memorial records this event, but the bodies would have been buried outside the churchyard; the burial register entries end with the letters pl.
In 1630 a charity school was established in Lower Square. This was a boarding school for girls of poor families whose fathers had died. The school continues today as Isleworth Blue School. The oldest surviving almshouses in the borough were built in Mill Plat in 1664. Called Ingrams' Almshouses, they are named after Sir Thomas Ingram, who founded them. He lived in a house by the Thames, later called Shrewsbury House. This was destroyed by fire in 1795 and is now the site of the Lion Wharf office development.
Isleworth Stairs, by the side of the present Town Wharf public house, were where local Watermen were hailed to ferry people up and down the river. Samuel Pepys in his diaries refers to hailing a waterman there to take him back to London after dining with his friend, Thomas Povey, at Hounslow Manor.
Church Ferry operated from in front of All Saints church across to the Isleworth gate into Kew Gardens. Commencing in the reign of King Henry VIII, it continued into the 1960s. At St Margaret's, the Railshead Ferry commenced in the reign of King George III and continued until the Second World War. The river provided wharves where coal, wood and other materials could be unloaded. Gunpowder from the mills on Hounslow Heath - the horses pulling the gunpowder carts were shod with copper horseshoes to avoid sparks - and flour from the Isleworth Flour Mill could be loaded for transportation to the London Docks. Isleworth was a port and maintained a Custom's house.
The start of the 18th century saw All Saints church in need of attention. In 1703 Sir Christopher Wren was employed to survey and report on the needs of the church. He recommended a new building and provided a design, similar to the new (post-Great Fire) churches in the City of London. The parish, being unable to finance Wren's design, employed a Richmond builder to modify the plans to fit their budget. The original mediaeval tower was retained and the new church, built in 1705, was attached to it.
During the 18th century houses with small estates were built along the river bank between Isleworth and Twickenham and men of arts and letters lived there. William Lacy, co-owner of Drury Lane Theatre, lived in Lacy House, situated between Gordon House and Twickenham Park. John Gumley, a glass manufacturer, had Gumley House built c.1700. It remained in family ownership until 1840, when it became a girls' Catholic convent school.
Throughout the 18th century public houses were licensed. Many names survive to this day, but apart from the London Apprentice and the George, their buildings were rebuilt in the 20th century. The London Apprentice is a popular riverside hostelry built in 1731. For part of the 18th century it had an all night licence, which led to stories of London apprentices rowing upriver to drink there. The George public house was licensed by 1743 and there is a record of the Swan from 1722, but the present building dates from c.1930.
Much of the parish in the 18th century became orchards supplying London with fresh fruit. Travellers using the London Road described the sea of pink blossom on either side of the road in May. Women from Shropshire were employed to pick the fruit and carry it in baskets on their heads up to Covent Garden market each day.
Isleworth Brewery commenced in 1726 and finally closed in 1991, with all buildings now demolished and the site redeveloped for housing. At Worton the Calico Mills operated in the second half of the 18th century. There was an Isleworth Pottery, situated by the banks of the River Crane close to its entry into the Thames. This made London Delftware pottery, but in the early 19th century moved to a site in Hanworth Road, Hounslow. The Duke of Northumberland has a collection of Isleworth pottery, as does the owner of an antique china shop in Church Street, Kensington. A recent archaeological dig on the Hanworth Road site found shards of 19th century pottery.
A second charity school for girls started as a Sunday school in 1796, becoming a day school in a house in Isleworth's Church Street in 1823. The Duke of Northumberland in 1859 provided a purpose-built school and Headmistress' house in Park Road; both these buildings survive as private houses. In 1906 the school, by now called the Green School, moved to new buildings at Busch Corner. The buildings suffered some bomb damage during the Second World War, which was rectified in the late 1940s.
A Union Workhouse to cater for the needs of the destitute of Chiswick, Brentford, Isleworth, Hounslow and Heston was built on the Twickenham Road in 1837. In 1896 this became a hospital and is today being rebuilt - its name is now West Middlesex University NHS Trust Hospital.
In 1849 the London and South Western Railway Company's loop line was completed to Isleworth from Barnes. Gradually the old estates were sold and the land became available for housing development. The orchards gave way to market gardens. Once the railway line opened, houses were built in north Isleworth close to the Railway station. One such new estate of detached Victorian villas was called the Woodlands. This led to a new parish church, dedicated to St John, being built in 1857, financed by the Farnell family, who owned Isleworth Brewery. The adjacent Vicarage, Infants School and Almshouses completed the development.
In 1862 Pears soapworks had a purpose-built factory on the northern side of the London Road. The expansion of the company was so great over the next twenty-five years that in the 1890s the opposite side of the road was developed with four new large factory buildings where the soap was made until 1962. Production was then transferred to Port Sunlight, Cheshire, as the company was by then owned by Unilever. Pears soap is now made in the Republic of India.
By the end of the 19th century new schools had been built to cope with the increase in the population. In 1897 a senior boys' school was created out of the Blue School in a new building in St John's Road on a site given by Andrew Pears. This school survives as Isleworth-Syon school in Ridgeway Road, Osterley, the present building opening in 1939. Isleworth Town and Worple Road schools were built around the same time.
In 1901 a tram service from Shepherd's Bush to Hounslow commenced travelling along the London Road through north Isleworth. In 1905 a second service from Hanwell to Hampton Court started which went through Isleworth.
From 1920-25 the Great West Road from Chiswick to Hounslow West was constructed, passing through the northern edge of Isleworth, bypassing Brentford High Street, the London Road and Hounslow High Street. Once the road was open, factories such as Firestone, Pyrene and Gillettes were built. In the 1950s the stretch of the road through Isleworth was known as the golden mile because of the internationally renowned companies with buildings located there.
During the 1920s and 1930s the market gardens on the outskirts of the village gave way to housing developments. This building work ceased during the Second World War, but in the late 1940s through to the early 1970s was replaced by public housing developments. In the 1980s Speyhawk Land and Estates Limited redeveloped the area around Church Street and Lower Square. Today the riverside sites of Isleworth House and the adjacent Brunel University campus are the subject of several planning applications, as is the site of the former Pears soap factory.
Isleworth retains enough of its old buildings to remind one of its long and interesting history.
The original village, from the River Thames to the Twickenham Road and bounded by South Street and North Street, is designated a Conservation area.
Andrea Cameron
Now retired, Andrea was formerly Chief Local Studies Librarian at Hounslow Central Library.
Transport before the Railway
The main thoroughfare linking the two parishes (Ealing and Hanwell) was the Uxbridge Road, a road with a long history. It was a major route out of London, first to Uxbridge, then to Oxford and the West Midlands. In the Middle Ages repair of highways was often problematic, liability falling usually on the parish or on the lord of the manor. As a means of regularising the matter, as far as main roads were concerned, turnpike trusts were formed, taking over the responsibility for maintenance and having the powers to levy tolls to pay for it.
The first such turnpike was created on part of the Great North Road in 1663; the stretch of Uxbridge Road between Tyburn (Marble Arch) and Uxbridge was turnpiked in 1715 and much of the rest by 1720. Toll houses were set up at regular intervals, and one stood in West Ealing near the Green Man public house. These individual turnpike trusts remained in existence until 1826 when all the London trusts were consolidated by the establishment of the Metropolis Roads Commission Trust, which had an annual revenue of £60-70,000 and controlled some 172 miles of roads. By 1872 all roads within the metropolitan area were freed from tolls and transferred to their respective local authorities.
Roads in Ealing, other than those maintained by the turnpike trusts, were governed by Highway Trustees established in 1767, but a similar highway board for Hanwell was not formed until 1885.
THE HEYDAY OF COACHES
Apart from private carriage traffic along the Uxbridge Road there were a number of regular coaches and carriers. The early decades of the nineteenth century have been described as the golden age of the stage coach and there were a great many coach operators and a bewildering number of routes. Coach traffic fell into two categories: the celebrated and romanticised long-distance vehicles with names such as Retaliator and Defiance, and the more prosaic, but nonetheless useful, short-stages. Long distance coaches and the bustling activity of the posthouses, where horses were changed and travellers sought refreshment, are familiar from the novels of eighteenth and nineteenth century writers. Ealing and Hanwell, of course, were on the route to places west such as Oxford, Birmingham, Banbury, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Worcester and Holyhead, but the long distance traffic only stopped to pick up and set down passengers, not to change horses, because post houses so near to London would have been unwarranted. The Paul Pry, for example, which ran daily to Worcester, called at the Bell Inn as did the Royal Mail; the Telegraph, whose destination was also Worcester, stopped at the Old Hats.
The short stages ran between central London and the suburban fringe and there were a number travelling to and from Uxbridge. The main operator on this route was the Uxbridge firm of Tollits, who in 1819 offered the journey from Holborn in three hours. In that year Ealing was being served by three short-stages a day coming from central London. In 1825 two coaches operated a service between Ealing and the City. During the 1830s the omnibus began to replace the short-stage coach. In 1838-39, at the time the Great Western Railway's London to Bristol line was opened, there were five short-stages operating between Holborn and Uxbridge, four run by various members of the Tollit family, and three omnibuses running between Ealing and the Bank, owned by the lves family, from the New Inn in St Mary's Road, by the parish church.
The same short-stages served Hanwell as well. Tollit's called at the Duke of York and the King's Arms, and later an omnibus ran between Hanwell and the Bank. The railway was to have a significant impact on the long distance coaches, but its initial effect was much reduced on the convenient short-stages and omnibuses. Still, by 1845, three coaches passed through Ealing and Hanwell to Uxbridge and Wycombe: the 'Prince of Wales' coach to Banbury and Oxford called at the Halfway House in Ealing Dean, and the lves' omnibuses were making six journeys a day from the Castle and New Inns.
Numerous public houses on the Uxbridge Road served the traffic. The Bell, the Feathers, the Green Man and the Old Hats, all appear on the 1777 parish map of Ealing. Market gardeners called in the early mornings at the Bell, and the Green Man in West Ealing was a carters' stopping place with stabling, reputably, for a hundred horses.
There were two public houses called the Old Hats, adjacent to each other near the Hanwell parish boundary. The more easterly, later known as the Original Old Hats, was of some antiquity and was described in 1796 as 'a general sauntering place for men and cattle, and the different mixture of farmers, landlords, postillions, stage-coach passengers etc. broiling in the sun', a scene depicted by Cruikshank.
In Hanwell, the Coach and Horses was situated near the bridge over the Brent. In 1838 a 'desperate affray' took place here involving labourers employed in the building of the Great Western Railway. Reflecting the change in transport the inn was renamed The Viaduct.
South of the Uxbridge Road the Bath Road passed through Brentford. The north-south routes, St Mary's Road, Northfield Lane and Gunnersbury Lane, linked Ealing with Brentford, while Boston Lane joined Hanwell and New Brentford. To the north of the Uxbridge Road Hanger Lane went from Ealing Common to Alperton, crossing the Brent near the Fox and Goose, and Castlebar Road from Haven Green to Greenford and Perivale. Green Lane took a northerly route from Ealing Dean to Greenford via Drayton Green and joined the Castlebar Road near the River Brent. Cuckoo Lane joined Hanwell and Greenford.