Qualla: Isleworth

Isleworth: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J. M. W. Turner, Public domain. In 695, an Anglo-Saxon charter recorded a permanent settlement called Gislheresuuyrth - the enclosure belonging to a man called Gislhere. By the time the Domesday Book reached it in 1086, the place was Gistelesworde and worth £72 a year to its overlords, with 55 ploughlands, 118 households, and a productive river frontage. Today the name has shrunk to Isleworth, the river is the Thames, and the town belongs to the London Borough of Hounslow. The pub by the church is called the London Apprentice and dates to the sixteenth century. The view of the river from the church tower is still the same view that J. M. W. Turner painted from a boat in the 1820s.

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Image: J. M. W. Turner | Public domain

Isleworth: Henry V's Monastery

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patche99z, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1415, Henry V granted nuns of the Swedish Bridgettine order land on the Thames opposite his new palace at Sheen. Seven years later he transferred the manor of Isleworth from the Duchy of Cornwall to the new community. In 1431 the nuns moved across the river and built their new...

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Image: Patche99z | CC BY-SA 3.0

Isleworth: Lady Jane Grey

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit yellow book, CC BY 2.0. From Syon House on a July morning in 1553, a sixteen-year-old girl named Jane Grey was rowed down the Thames to the Tower of London to be made Queen of England. She had not asked to be queen. Her father-in-law had pushed her forward against the Catholic claim of Mary Tudor, and J...

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Image: yellow book | CC BY 2.0

Isleworth: Van Gogh on the Twickenham Road

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vincent van Gogh, Public domain. In 1876 a struggling Dutch art dealer in his early twenties came to Isleworth to take a job as a teacher and assistant preacher at a small school. He was, at this point in his life, more interested in being a Methodist evangelist than a painter. He preached his first sermon in a ...

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Image: Vincent van Gogh | Public domain

Isleworth: Marina and Prince

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Garnerandhancockllp, CC0. Among the residents of Isleworth in 1765 were two people who appear in the historical record only because their enslavers placed advertisements seeking their capture. Marina Dellap was a young woman in her twenties, brought from Jamaica about a year before, who lived in the house...

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Image: Garnerandhancockllp | CC0

Isleworth: Spring Grove and the Pears Family

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original painting was by Thomas Phillips (1770-1845); the engraving was by Nicholas Schiavonetti (d. 1813), Public domain. Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist who sailed with Captain Cook on the Endeavour and helped found Kew Gardens, lived at Spring Grove House in the eighteenth century. In 1886 the house was bought by Andrew Pears, the third-generation head of the family soap business that had been maki...

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Image: The original painting was by Thomas Phillips (1770-1845); the engraving was by Nicholas Schiavonetti (d. 1813) | Public domain

Isleworth: The Boy Who Watched Animals

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 69JackSmith, CC0. On 8 May 1926, in a house in Isleworth, a son was born to Frederick Attenborough, a Cambridge-educated principal of the local university college, and his wife Mary. The boy was named David, and from a young age he collected fossils and small reptiles in the gardens around the fam...

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Image: 69JackSmith | CC0