Oral Histories

To counteract a draining away of memories about Old Chiswick, we have set up an Oral history project to capture this unique and invaluable information. 

We have begun to record local residents’ recollections, and we know of other people with stories to tell. If you have memories to share and haven’t yet been in touch, do contact Thérèse Bennett through the Society. 

Here are edited extracts of two people remembering Chiswick before – or in some cases during – the building of the 'Cromwell Road Extension' (the A4) around 1955. 

Gwyneth Cole

– the 1950s. I can remember when I first moved into Hammersmith Terrace, the police coming along and saying “Danger of flooding, get out of the basements”. And I remember my husband and I looking out of the window and seeing that the whole of the Mall was drowned and on the Eyot were only little willow spikes. You couldn’t see any ground at all; just one long sheet of smooth water right across, including the towpath the other side...

Further down Hammersmith Terrace lived A.P. Herbert. He had a boat called the Water Gypsy. One day he called over the walls “Gwyneth, would you like to come down the river on the Water Gypsy?” So I said, “Yes, thank you very much”. We got half way down towards Hammersmith when his two granddaughters waved at him from the wall; he stopped and picked them up and we went on down to the Houses of Parliament and anchored there to have lunch. We decided to have a swim. It’s an extraordinary idea, but we did. I had my swimming things with me but neither of the girls did, so they asked if they could borrow mine after I came in, and I said, “Yes, of course”. So I got in and was swimming around – and there were these two children swimming around and I thought ‘What have they got on?’ Well they hadn’t got anything on and when they climbed out naked, APH said “and in front of the House”. I’ve never forgotten that...

When they were building the A4, the road was up and everybody got stuck and they started coming along Hammersmith Terrace. Everybody in the Terrace got very fed up about this because we had masses of cars just pouring through there all the time in order to avoid the traffic. One of the enterprising girls who lived on the Terrace decided that we should all park our cars across the road so that they couldn’t pass, and of course there was chaos because there were people hung up in the main road not being able to move – stopping all the traffic right up into Hammersmith.

Alice Nissen

 – the 1950s. The houses on the Mall were not painted nicely, the gardens were unkempt, there were very few trees, and it was quite bare, dull and scruffy, it was a kind of industrial hinterland. It was somewhat off the beaten track in terms of Chiswick. The High Road was the main centre of Chiswick, with a lot of little houses, which were multi-occupied around it. When I was at Notting Hill and Ealing School, I was rather ashamed to say I came from Chiswick because Chiswick was a down-market place...

College House is bang in the middle of what was to be a road leading to a bridge across the river. It started to be built just before the First World War but I suppose it must have been planned a lot earlier because Thames Bank and Field House were built with their front doors at the side, and in the yard between their front doors, if you dig in the gravel, you come to the edge of the pavement on each side. Thames Bank, where I grew up, was built in about 1880, so they must have planned this road bridge, which was to go across the river, jumping onto the island…

When they started building the A4, they dug very deep trenches across the line that the new road would take. Every 50 yards there’d be a trench about 5 feet across. I was big enough then and quite athletic, and I loved playing horses going to school, and we’d gallop and jump over these huge ditches. There certainly was no health and safety, no fences or ‘keep off’ or anything like that, and we children, we just used them as a playground and we’d go to school as racehorses racing ditches rather than
fences. I loved that.