And an island lies in mid-stream; an island on which, for many years past, men may have been observed wheeling barrows to and fro and engaged in other apparently aimless activities that certainly during the last thirty years have had no beginning and no end. It is a picturesque island, with flourishing trees, and it looks a most desirable Robinson Crusoe kind of a place, especially when viewed from the trains, that just here cross the river on an ugly lattice-girder bridge. A timber gantry projects from one side, and things are done with old boilers and launches. Repairs are occasionally made to the banks of this island, and they have at last resulted in making it a very solid and substantial place, faced upstream and down and round about with bags of concrete; so that no conceivable Thames flood that ever was, or can be, could possibly wash it away.
There is half a mile of Strand-on-the-Green. It is a fairly complete and representative community, comprising in its one row of houses those of an almost stately residential class, including Zoffany House, where the painter of that name lived and died at last in 1810; some lesser houses, a number of cottages housing a waterside population, three inns, the “Bull’s Head,” the “City Barge,” and the “Bell and Crown”; and some shops of an obscure kind, such as one might expect to see only in remote villages. A highly-sketchable old malthouse or two and a row of almshouses complete the picture. As to the almshouses, they are going on for the completion of their second century, as a tablet on them declares:
Two of these Houses built by R. Thomas Child, one by M. Soloman Williams, and one by William Abbott, Carpinter, at his own Charge for ye use of ye Poor of Chiswick for Ever, A.D. 1724.
Also the Port of London Authority has an office overlooking the river, and a firm of motor-boat builders has established works here, amid the ancient barges—a curious modern touch.
STRAND-ON-THE-GREEN: VIEW UP-RIVER.
Strand-on-the-Green is a hamlet of Chiswick, long a delightful retreat of the Dukes of Devonshire, whose stately mansion of Chiswick House in its surrounding park dignified the old village. But when a suburban population grew up around the neighbourhood of that lordly dwelling-house the owners left it. There is an antipathy between dukes and democracy comparable only to oil and water. Even the neighbourhood of a highly-respectable (and highly-rented) suburb renders the air enervating to ducal lungs, even though the ducal purse be inordinately enriched by the ground-rents of it. It seems that when a man becomes a duke the sight of other men’s chimney-pots grows unendurable; unless indeed they be the chimney-pots of another duke; and so he is fain to seclude himself in the middle of his biggest park, in the most solitary part of the country he can find. The higher his rank in the peerage, the more cubic feet of air he requires.
What I should like to see—but what no one ever will see—would be a duke graciously continuing to reside in the midst of the suburb that has grown up around him, and to which he owes a good part of his living, and being quite nice to his neighbours. Not only patronising and charitable to the poor, but just as human and accessible as middle-class snobbery would allow him to be.