4 ISLANDS IN THE THAMES (AND I THAT ISN'T)

1. Eel Pie Island
Previously known as Twickenham Ait, it was re-named after a tavern, long demolished, which was famous for its eel pies. In Dickens's novel Nicholas Nickleby one of the characters visits Eel Pie Island, 'there to make merry upon a cold collation, bottled beer, shrub, and shrimps, and to dance in the open air to the music of a locomotive band, conveyed thither for the purpose'. Described recently by Simon Hoggart as 'a strange village marooned in the middle of the river, which looks as if it might float off towards Kent at any moment', Eel Pie Island is now best known for its rock music connections. The Eel Pie Hotel played host to dozens of famous names in the 1960s. The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Yardbirds, Long John Baldry, Eric Clapton and Rod Stewart all performed on the island between 1962 and 1967.
2.Oliver's Island, Kew
Facing Strand-on-the-Green, the island is allegedly named after Oliver Cromwell whose daughter Mary lived nearby.
3.Chiswick Eyot
This is the only island on the course of the Boat Race.
4.Trowlock Island, Teddington
Named after a type of Thames barge called a 'trow', the island is a third of a mile long and has a small population living in the two dozen bungalows that have been built on it. Access is by a hand-wound chain ferry.
+1. Isle of Dogs
Actually a peninsula, the Isle of Dogs was first named as such on a late sixteenth-century map and it's speculated that it took this name because Henry VIII kennelled his hunting dogs there. Pepys visited there and had a miserable time. 'So we were fain to stay there, in the unlucky Isle of Doggs,' he wrote in his diary in July 1665, 'in a chill place, the morning cool, and wind fresh, above two if not three hours to our great discontent'. The area only became economically significant with the building of the docks in the early nineteenth century. The West India Dock, built in 1802, was big enough to accommodate six hundred ships. The Isle of Dogs was suggested as a site for the Great Exhibition of 1851 but, probably wisely, the authorities decided that Hyde Park was a better place to stage it.
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