Latest Brentford & Chiswick Local History Journal published

The latest issue of the Local History Journal has just been published. As usual it includes an amazing range of subjects with a Brentford or Chiswick connection. All the authors are local and most of the articles are the result of completely new research.

There is something for everyone in this issue. The What’s New section touches on a recently discovered Brentford painting, the centenary of Hogarth’s House opening as a museum and the bicentenary if the Royal Horticultural Society, whose gardens lay south of Turnham Green until they moved to Wisley in 1904. It also includes two new local blue plaques, a gift of local property deeds, the new web site, Thames Pilot and recent publications.

Two pieces deal with Brentford “institutions”, with Carolyn Hammond, the local studies librarian at Chiswick Library, providing an account of the origins of Brentford Library a hundred years ago and Gill Clegg, the journal’s editor, looking at the Boatmen’s Institute in The Butts, which has recently been sold. Stephen Hine provides a splendid account of Chiswick’s forgotten brewery, the Lamb, which operated next door to the Griffin on Chiswick Mall until 1920.

The lives of the local working classes are covered in a fascinating account of early council housing in Brentford by Nick Pratt and John Grigg’s tremendous description of the 1897 engineers’ strike which affected Thornycrofts’ works at Chiswick Mall. Finally, two eighteenth century themes are covered in Rodney Walshaw’s account of the pioneering mapmaker John Rocque, and the description of two linked social and intellectual networks of neighbours in Chiswick, put together by James Wisdom and Val Bott.

Members of the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society receive a copy of the Journal each year as part of their £7.00 subscription; copies are also on sale at local libraries, price £4.00 or can be ordered by post from the Society at 25 Hartington Road, London W4 3TL, price £4.60 (including postage).

June 18, 2004