Five... slices from the history of Eel Pie Island
London's tiny island with a big role in musical history
Hi and welcome to your weekend newsletter… 🥧
This week I’m bringing you a celebration of Eel Pie history, inspired in part by the island’s Open Studios Weekend coming soon, on 29-30 June and 6-7 July 2024. It’s your annual chance to explore the (now otherwise private and residential) tiny west London island, now an artists’ community.
Accessible only by boat or footbridge, Eel Pie Island sits in the Thames in the borough of Richmond — looking, from across the river, improbably peaceful to have had such a storied past. But the tiny Eel Pie Museum (housed on the mainland, in an old cinema building on Richmond Road) tells a wilder story, with records of parties for over a century — first ballroom dances, then jazz and blues gigs, before becoming a major venue in the 1960s rock and roll scene.
A sidenote first for all lovers of either: 1/ maps, or 2/ incredibly deep dives into niche corners of London history, last Thursday marked the first ever newsletter from
— a look at 100 years ago, when Croydon was the epicentre of a glimmering world of continental travel, skyhigh cocktails and murder mysteries. Includes a lesserknown Harry Beck airline routes map, in the style of his London underground maps.And just advance warning that this weekend newsletter will be on a fortnight’s pause while I’m on holiday, though the Time Machine will still be taking flight for its usual weekday editions.
Ok, onwards to Eel Pie island…
A Dickens-era party destination
Dickens was a regular visitor to Richmond, spending holidays at different rented cottages and inns with his family, and giving a number of cameos to the borough in his novels. When Richmond features in his fiction it’s usually as a place of gentle, bucolic calm (as in Little Dorrit) or quiet exile from the city (as in Great Expectations):
‘Some ancient trees before the house were still cut into fashions as formal and unnatural as the hoops and wigs and stiff skirts; but their own allotted places in the great procession of the dead were not far off, and they would soon drop into them and go the silent way of the rest.’
In Nicholas Nickleby, though, he namechecks the island itself, and it represents a wilder time in his novels than the rest of Richmond: a place where people travel by steamer boat from the city ‘to make merry upon a cold collation, bottled-beer, shrub and shrimps and to dance to the music of a locomotive band.’
The Jazz Age
In 1956 EELPILAND officially opened: home of the Eel Pie Jazz Club, and for years, trad jazz was the focal point for the island’s gigs — with performances from Cy Laurie, Acker Bilk and Les Six Orleanais in the first couple of years, among hundreds more. The venue was so popular that less than a year after it opened the owner, Michael Snapper, funded the construction of a footbridge, opening in 1957 — before that, a chain ferry or private boat had been the only ways to access the island.