Why you should visit London’s Eel Pie Island, a throwback San Francisco-on-the-Thames only open 2 or 3 times a year
- Charles Dickens visited way back; William Hartnell, the original Doctor Who, lived here; and the likes of The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Who and Eric Clapton played at the now-defunct hotel
Hollywood loves a land that time forgot: any mythical, feral, fantastical, fun place that decided it was perfectly fine as it was, thank you, when the world moved on.
For two weekends a year in June or July – and perhaps a third, in December, but as with much of what happens in a semi-believable land the rules are fluid – the “square” world is permitted to taste Eel Pie Island’s otherwise forbidden fruit. Then, the general public is welcome to cross from Twickenham on the mainland via the single fixed route (a narrow, pedestrian bridge dating from 1957) to the reservation and visit the premises of the creative natives.
Painters’, potters’ and printmakers’ dens; functioning boatyards and earthbound, desiccated dinghies; nautical memorabilia and junk; pavement sculptures, tropical-temperate jungle; and ugly sandals and patchwork-quilt trousers dazzle the lucky – yes, lucky – visitor.
Because even artists must make a living, vulgar commerce might lie behind the lowering of the metaphorical drawbridge. But whatever the prompt, for those precious weekends their studios throw wide their doors. When the traffic-free, entry fee-free island is nominally closed, however, visitors find little accessible but its central footpath. That leads to a dead end near where the Eel Pie Island Hotel stood before it was destroyed in a “mysterious” fire in 1971, having previously been commandeered by Britain’s biggest hippie commune.
