Twickenham - Geography

Geography

The town is bordered on the south-eastern side by the River Thames and Eel Pie Island — which is connected to the Twickenham embankment by a narrow footbridge, the first of which was erected in 1957. Before this, access was by means of a hand-operated ferry that was hauled across using a chain on the riverbed. The land adjacent to the river, from Strawberry Hill in the south to Marble Hill Park in the north, is occupied by a mixture of luxury dwellings, formal gardens, public houses and a newly built park and leisure facility.

In the south, in Strawberry Hill, lies St Mary's University College, Twickenham (the oldest Catholic college in the United Kingdom), historically specialising in sports studies, teacher training, religious studies, the humanities, drama studies and English literature. Strawberry Hill was originally a small cottage in two or three acres (8,000 or 12,000 m²) of land by the River Thames. Horace Walpole, a son of the politician Robert Walpole, rented the cottage in 1747 and subsequently bought it and turned it into one of the incunabula of the Gothic revival. The college shares part of its campus with Walpole's Strawberry Hill. On adjacent land were the villa and garden of the poet Alexander Pope. A road just north of the campus is named Pope's Grove, and a local landmark next to the main road is the Alexander Pope Hotel (until recently known as Pope's Grotto), a public house and hotel where Pope's landmark informal garden used to be. Near this hostelry lie St Catherine's school for girls and St James's school for boys, formerly a convent, in a building on the site of Pope's white stucco villa and the location of Pope's original — surviving — grotto.

There are a large number of fine houses in the area, many of them Victorian. The open space known as Radnor Gardens lies opposite Pope's Grotto.

Twickenham proper begins in the vicinity of Pope's Grotto, with a large and expensive residential area of (mostly) period houses to the west, and a number of exclusive properties to the east, on or near the river. Further to the north and west lies the town of Whitton, an area once of allotments and farm land but now of 1930s housing.

The district of St Margarets lies to the north-east of central Twickenham, across the river from Richmond. It is popular for its attractive tree-lined residential roads and an eclectic range of shops and cafés. It is also the home of Twickenham Studios, one of London's most important film studios.

St Margarets abuts the River Thames to the east, but the greater part of the river frontage in this area falls within East Twickenham. East Twickenham sits largely on the former Twickenham Park (estate of Sir Francis Bacon, the 16th century philosopher and Lord Chancellor) together with the former Cambridge Park, home of Richard Owen Cambridge, the 18th century satirical poet. The London suburb of Isleworth lies to the north of Twickenham and St Margarets.