Come Hell or High Water

It faces the monied waterfront of Twickenham. And boasts one of the capital’s most exclusive postcodes. But there is a contrary spirit to Eel Pie Island. In its time, the island – only 600ft end-to-end – has been a bowling green, a duelling square, and a parade ground for the Grand Old Duke of York. And a few of his 10,000 men. Dickens stayed there to write Little Dorrit. It has been home to mistresses of the well-to-do, and a centre for London’s counter-culture. In the 1960s – when a prosaic headline writer at the Middlesex Chronicle called it ‘the Isle of Rhythm’ – the Eel Pie Hotel hosted gigs by The Rolling Stones and The Who. It degenerated into a commune, and was closed down by Health and Safety. Eel Pie has always been a place apart.

It’s oddly fitting that this absurd little place should be home to something as singular as the eel pie. Henry VIII insisted that the esteemed first pie of the season be delivered to Hampton Court by the Waterman of Twickenham. But Trevor Baylis (the millionaire inventor of the wind-up radio) likes the peculiarity. “Eel Pie is 50 drunks clinging to a mudflat” he says. “We’re all hedonists, and there’s a sound of jazz about the place. A lot of my mates are artists, potters and theatre folk, and what gives us a buzz doesn’t necessarily give people a buzz on the mainland. If I’d wanted to live in Acacia Avenue, with the lupins in a straight line, I would have. I’m not averse to people putting their lupins in a straight line. And I don’t mind if they live in a two-up two-down. It’s just not me. And it’s not Eel Pie.”

Costume designer Rosa Diaz didn’t want lupins in her garden. So she planted dolls’ heads and plastic flowers instead. “I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t Eel Pie Island” says Diaz. “Well, not in the front yard, anyway. I worked for Hasbro, years ago, and they had loads of dolls they just chucked out. I was like ‘Ooh, can I have them?’ Their joints – I just think they’re funny. Drunk kids sometimes come onto the island on Saturday nights and steal the dolls. I’ll go over the bridge on a Sunday morning, and the heads are floating in the river. But I think it would be worse if I lived on the mainland. People have even started to leave dolls on my doorstep. My garden has become an orphanage for lost dolls. It’s very Eel Pie.”

Eel Pie is an unusual place to showcase architectural excellence. But it’s where Clive Chapman decided to set up his practice 15 years ago. “It wasn’t until the 80s that people started to realise the significance of the island architecture. After all, it’s opposite Ham House, and it can be seen from Richmond Hill. Now the planning constraints are ridiculously tight, and all the shanty houses are protected. It’s wrapped in aspic jelly. But I like it. My wife is from the San Francisco waterfront - and Eel Pie is as near as London is going to get to the San Francisco waterfront. Sometimes, half of me thinks the place should be tidied up. But the other half thinks ‘That’s why I like it. It’s not Sunningdale’.”

One Eel Pie family moved from No 14 to No 13. And then to No 10. They joked it was because they wanted to move nearer London. But no-one believed them. People still bemoan the day the footbridge to ‘the mainland’ was delivered – someone, somewhere, probably composed a protest song about it. Eel Pie Islanders like to feel separate from their wage-slave neighbours. They are more than a collection of individuals who catch the same train every morning. They are a community. And a sustainable, mixed-use community at that. The island supports everything from guitar-making to stained-glass-making, but the money is in the dirty business of boat-building. Eel Pie is like a social experiment, where leaking houseboats moor alongside architect-designed townhouses. And the well-to-do mix with the down-at-heel.

It’s the Thames that brings the Islanders together. Not always under the happiest of circumstances. Before the advent of the Barrier, the place was prone to flooding. “Once I was sitting watching the telly” says Baylis, “and starting to doze off, when I noticed my feet getting hot. I looked down and the water from my swimming pool was round my ankles. Someone said ‘Come over - we’re having a party until the tide goes down’. So I put on my wetsuit, and a sweater, and went out to party. I looked like Max Wall. I sat on the sofa, next to this guy, and said ‘I’ve got my own business’. At the time I was in the swimming pool business. He said ‘I’ve got a business too’. Out of politeness I said ‘What’s that?’. He said ‘Rank Hovis McDougall’. This island is a mix of all sorts.”

“You’ve absolutely got to have the right frame of mind” says Bill Double, chairman of the Eel Pie Island Association. “You’ve got to be a kind of beatnik. I first heard about Eel Pie in an advertisement in Daltons Weekly. “‘Come and live on an island’ it said. So we did. And that was back in 1966. Those who come thinking it’s idyllic will leave within a year. That’s happened half-a-dozen times, to my knowledge. Eel Pie doesn’t suit everybody. There are the worries about the water supply, the proximity to your neighbours, and the hassle of getting your shopping home. Although Iceland do deliver door-to-door now. But I think it’s worth any inconvenience. And I certainly wouldn’t like it to change.”

But change has now become inevitable. The island’s boat-building tradition has been under threat since Simms’ boatyard - famous for supplying the Oxford and Cambridge boat crews – closed down. Pete Townshend, the guitarist from the Who, used to live in a house overlooking Eel Pie and liked to patronise Simms’ when he could. “Bill [Simms] and I built the second and last of his 55-foot superfast, narrow, low-wash motorboats (designed to carry BBC film-crews behind the boat race). I lost my license one day for driving home drunk from Olympic Studios at four in the morning, and started to moor a little speedboat there that I used to commute. It took about 55 minutes during the day, making phone calls and eating breakfast like a Lord. At night we could get home in 30 minutes. It was wild.”

After the closure of Simms’, a fire burnt down the island marine - one of the Thames’ last fully functioning boatyards. The warren of artists’ studios went up as well. Now the site is being redeveloped, and the islanders fear the worst. “95% of Eel Pie is united against the arrival of yuppies” says Double. “Most of us simply want to replace what was lost in the fire. We don’t want our island home turned into the new Docklands with lots of expensive flats thankyou very much. This community depends on its riverside activities, and there’s a very strong desire to maintain the working waterfront. So much of it has been lost to development in recent years. But it’s a struggle which I’m not sure we’re going to win.”

In the days before the bridge to the mainland, visitors to Eel Pie would catch a ferry. Well, a four-man rowboat, run by Rosie and her sister. Tuppence onto the island, and tuppence off. Payable in advance, if Rosie didn’t like the look of you. Gladys Heath was fond of taking a day-trip to the island tearooms of a summer afternoon. “This little old lady – I think her name was Ada – used to make her own apple pies. It was a funny little shack of a place, with a wonderful assortment of canaries and bluebirds. I loved it on the island then, but my husband and I didn’t want to have to catch a ferry to work every day. But when the bridge finally went up [in 1957], we decided to move there once and for all.” Gladys, now 91, is Eel Pie’s longest-standing resident.

Gladys and her husband built their own house – a self-assembly chalet that she saw advertised in the back of the Sunday Pictorial. “It came over from Norway in 1958, on the same liner as the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree. It changed boats at Tilbury and a big barge dumped it at the end of the garden. We thought it would fit in with the trees. It looked lovely, but part of me was still embarrassed to live on Eel Pie. It had a bit of a reputation. Back when women weren’t liberated, we had three mistresses who lived on the island. I remember one called Auntie Vi. She had big, bad legs. She was in a terrible state when she died. If ever I had to give my name and address, they would say ‘Gladys, I never thought you would have lived over there’. So I tried not to tell anyone.”

“I’ve seen some things in my time on this island” she says. “That Trevor Baylis used to give some wild parties. He wouldn’t start until 11pm. The other neighbours used to get furious. He would have topless girls on the roof. Lots of them. He’s got too old now. He’s past it. I think now he’s on television [Baylis presents a slot on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast] he has to get to bed early. In the old days there were lots of punts up and down here. It was lovely. Now that mad beast Trevor has got a couple of speed boats. You couldn’t have a punt on the river with all that going on. Mind you, you wouldn’t want to. My son used to have a fishing net. I would call him ‘Quick! Quick! A mass of tiddlers!’ If you look in the river now, all you see is mud. I wouldn’t want to put my big toe in there today.”

But cormorants and herons still loiter in the shallows of Eel Pie. Island bores will tell you that the second largest pike in England was landed near the bridge, and that the tidal mud is home to a rare species of millipede. The island has two tiny nature reserves at either end, and refuses entry to cars and mopeds. A plume of fresh, sea air washes over the island whenever the tide thinks to rise, and the only noise comes from geese and the occasional moorhen. “And the airplanes” says Rowland Morgan, the island’s environmental conscience. “The biggest horror of living here is the blast of noise from Heathrow, and the contrails of the jetliners transiting far overhead. They steal the sunshine, by lacing the sky with cirrus cloud until it’s semi-overcast.”

Morgan moved to Eel Pie for the sake of his children. “They have roamed in a way no others can, and that is a rare privilege”. He likes to swim in the Thames - even though the hand-painted signs say it’s dangerous. There are 60 sewage outlets upriver, and Thames Water haven’t screened off all the drains. During heavy storms, the untreated waste pours into the river. So Morgan wisely waits for a prolonged dry spell before pulling on his shorts. “Teddington Lock and Isleworth Lock were built to turn the water around Eel Pie into a semi-tidal boating lake. Now look at it. All the day-trippers on pleasure cruisers. I like to wave to them from the bank outside my house - glad that I am here, and not there with them.”

In 1957, Eel Pie discovered jazz. And itself. “On nights when there was jazz at the Eel Pie Hotel, there was a turnstile to get on to the island” says Sandy Scott, who still runs the Lion Boatyard. “But that was wrecked by hooligans. So they put a woman on guard. One cold winter, they put an oil stove in her tin hut and her fur coat caught fire. She was 70, but she took the money home in a little wicker basket on wheels. Nobody ever touched her.” The young Baylis remembers it well. “But it all went downhill after Acker Bilk played here. We were jazz purists you see. I remember coming over the bridge one night in 1962. I heard this electric music and thought ‘Jesus, what the hell is that?’ I turned on my heels. I didn’t know it, but that was the first gig by the Rolling Stones.”

It wasn’t just the music that attracted the youngsters. Or the Eel Pie Hotel’s sprung maple dancefloor. It was the cheap cider. And the atmosphere. “We would all turn up on the mainland in our sports cars” says Baylis. “Inner tubes hanging out of the wheels. Everybody was drunk in charge, and all the girls were dressed in woad - black eyes, black lips, black stockings. Joints were in abundance. But hey man it was the 60s. And sex! If you wanted to get your leg over, you came to Eel Pie Island. There was a real spirit of freedom about the place. I think I probably spent more time in the clinic than I did listening to music.” After a string of negative press reports, the Eel Pie Hotel lost its licence – but the youngsters didn’t want to go home. So they set up a commune.

“The so-called ‘hippies’ actually developed quickly into drug-addicts and thieves” says Townshend. “As a rock star I felt quite at home with them, though they often woke me at five in the morning for tea bags.” Ted Leppard, who still runs the island’s biggest boatyard, remembers seeing teepees on the Hotel lawn. “And hippies running round in the altogether. A few years ago, this very respectable gentleman came to the boatyard with two grown-up children. He said ‘I was one of the last people to live in that Hotel’. I said ‘But it was all bloody hippies’. He said ‘I was one of those hippies’. I couldn’t believe it. I said ‘You weren't living in a teepee, running around in the altogether were you? He said ‘I was. But don't tell the wife’.”

“Mammon arrived in 1970” says Baylis - the year the builders started to clear the Hotel site. And begin work on Aquarius. “It’s where the posh folk live” says Baylis. “I go and see them when I want a letter written. It was built much to our disgust, to be honest. I acquired a lot of the bricks to build my house from that site. Their soundproofing isn’t because of me. Now I say I live at Number 19 Aquarius. A lot of them came onto the island with Qwa Qwa accents, and they were simply in the way. We don’t have a lot of time for la-de-das. They were rich, we were poor.” It’s the first time I’ve heard a millionaire declare himself poor - apart from when he’s writing to the taxman. “Well, I’m still the same bloke I always was. I can’t change my blood line. My family goes all the way back to the broom cupboard.”

The fire at the Eel Pie Marine in November 1996 accelerated the island’s gentrification. “There was a Guy Fawkes party going on when suddenly – from among the noise of the fireworks – came this sound of shouting” says Bill Double. “The Marine was in flames and, if the wind had changed direction, the whole island would have gone up. The place was full of gas cylinders. The fire brigade had to run their hoses across the bridge because there wasn’t enough water pressure on the island. It took all night to finally put out the fire.” The islanders tried to raise funds to replace what was lost. There was even talk of Pink Floyd and The Who playing a fund-raising benefit at the Twickenham rugby ground. But it was only talk. In the end it amounted to nothing.

“When I heard the old Marine had burned down” says Townshend “I'm afraid I was sorry, but unwilling to help financially. That kind of setup must survive on its own feet or not at all. It is not just developers who threaten Eel Pie Island, but island people running away from the world who still want access to M&S. They aren’t all as accessible or affable as Trevor in my experience, though I may be doing the present community an injustice. At one time before I bought the Boathouse at Isleworth, I tried to buy the Marine for my own studio use. I'm glad I didn’t. Its years as an artistic and marine community were wonderful. Quite a few musicians had little computer studios there. The fire was a real tragedy.”

Margaret Morrison, an island artist, lost more than 40 paintings in the fire. She moved to temporary studio space in the wheelhouse of a converted trawler. It had been left on the island when the trawler was converted into a houseboat. It wasn’t insulated – and the only heat was from a single-bar electric fire. “Working there wasn’t easy” says Morrison. “I got rain coming down the funnel, and splashing onto my paintings. But it suited my mood after the fire.There were people - including Trevor – who said the mess left by the fire was an eyesore. He just wanted to get rid of it. But I had to learn to ‘let go’ first. So I did this big canvas of Kali - the goddess of destruction. I went up the staircase of the burnt-out marine topless because I wanted to feel I was exposing myself. Then I set fire to my painting. It really helped me.”

Others have channelled their feelings in different ways. But most are united in opposition to any residential development on the old Marine. “I do worry about yuppies on Eel Pie” says Baylis. “We don’t want this place to become the birthplace of the garden gnome. We don’t want it to become like Peacehaven. Do you follow me? We don’t want it to be fine women in Laura Ashley prints. Since my invention, I can call the CO Jack. I can call the Commanding Officer by his first name. But we don’t judge anyone by the cut of their cloth here. Which is just as well in my case. There’s an expression I’m fond of - ‘I don’t mind anyone looking down on me, as long as they don’t expect me to be looking up at them’. I want Eel Pie to stay like that.”

The planning permission is for three large business premises, a block of studios and a slipway. The studios may have kitchens. And toilets. Islanders argue that – with the minimum of adaptation – they can be converted to apartments. And it won’t be complicated to change their lease from light industrial to residential. Leppard, who runs the boatyard next door, will refuse to let it happen. “We will object to anything residential” he says. “If we have houses, how long before they say we can't make noise? Take Docklands. The boats used to host parties at night. No complaints. Now residents are ringing up the port of London and complaining about the noise. Yet they are the ones intruding on the river. It's like people who go to the country, and complain about the cocks crowing.

Henry Cope-Harrison, the architect/developer who owns the marine site, has yet to decide what the development will look like. “I don’t think Eel Pie is the right place for three large business premises. Access through Ted Leppard’s boat yard is difficult - at best he tolerates us, and at worst he's downright antagonistic – and a large company wouldn’t put up with that.” So Cope-Harrison wants permission to build more studios instead. “I don’t think the studios will attract yuppies. They will appeal to people who are slightly unconventional. People who are keen to determine their own environment. Very Eel Pie. I know it takes time to win people's confidence. I won't win the confidence of Ted Leppard, but the other islanders will realise that I'm no threat to the Eel Pie way of life.”

Leppard isn’t convinced. “The government need to say ‘From now on, no developer can build on a boatyard’. If you take every boatyard away, you'll kill the Thames. Look at Richmond, Teddington, Mortlake - they have all been developed. I can understand why. Running a boatyard isn't a mega money game. If a property developer comes along and says ‘I'll give you two-and-a-half million quid for your boatyard’, what fool is going to say no? I'm the exception. But there’s more to life than money. What good is it? You either drink yourself stupid, or end up in trouble. I’m not well. I suffer from hypertension. The arsehole who owns the Marine is getting me all wound up. But I'm not going to let him destroy something which has been there hundreds of years. Eel Pie is too special for that.”



		Come Hell or High Water It faces the monied waterfront of Twickenham. And boasts one of the capital’s most exclusive postcodes. But there is a contrary spirit to Eel Pie Island. In its time, the island – only 600ft end-to-end – has been a bowling green, a duelling square, and a parade ground for the Grand Old Duke of York. And a few of his 10,000 men. Dickens stayed there to write Little Dorrit. It has been home to mistresses of the well-to-do, and a centre for London’s counter-culture. In the 1960s – when a prosaic headline writer at the Middlesex Chronicle called it ‘the Isle of Rhythm’ – the Eel Pie Hotel hosted gigs by The Rolling Stones and The Who. It degenerated into a commune, and was closed down by Health and Safety. Eel Pie has always been a place apart. It’s oddly fitting that this absurd little place should be home to something as singular as the eel pie. Henry VIII insisted that the esteemed first pie of the season be delivered to Hampton Court by the Waterman of Twickenham. But Trevor Baylis (the millionaire inventor of the wind-up radio) likes the peculiarity. “Eel Pie is 50 drunks clinging to a mudflat” he says. “We’re all hedonists, and there’s a sound of jazz about the place. A lot of my mates are artists, potters and theatre folk, and what gives us a buzz doesn’t necessarily give people a buzz on the mainland. If I’d wanted to live in Acacia Avenue, with the lupins in a straight line, I would have. I’m not averse to people putting their lupins in a straight line. And I don’t mind if they live in a two-up two-down. It’s just not me. And it’s not Eel Pie.” Costume designer Rosa Diaz didn’t want lupins in her garden. So she planted dolls’ heads and plastic flowers instead. “I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t Eel Pie Island” says Diaz. “Well, not in the front yard, anyway. I worked for Hasbro, years ago, and they had loads of dolls they just chucked out. I was like ‘Ooh, can I have them?’ Their joints – I just think they’re funny. Drunk kids sometimes come onto the island on Saturday nights and steal the dolls. I’ll go over the bridge on a Sunday morning, and the heads are floating in the river. But I think it would be worse if I lived on the mainland. People have even started to leave dolls on my doorstep. My garden has become an orphanage for lost dolls. It’s very Eel Pie.” Eel Pie is an unusual place to showcase architectural excellence. But it’s where Clive Chapman decided to set up his practice 15 years ago. “It wasn’t until the 80s that people started to realise the significance of the island architecture. After all, it’s opposite Ham House, and it can be seen from Richmond Hill. Now the planning constraints are ridiculously tight, and all the shanty houses are protected. It’s wrapped in aspic jelly. But I like it. My wife is from the San Francisco waterfront - and Eel Pie is as near as London is going to get to the San Francisco waterfront. Sometimes, half of me thinks the place should be tidied up. But the other half thinks ‘That’s why I like it. It’s not Sunningdale’.” One Eel Pie family moved from No 14 to No 13. And then to No 10. They joked it was because they wanted to move nearer London. But no-one believed them. People still bemoan the day the footbridge to ‘the mainland’ was delivered – someone, somewhere, probably composed a protest song about it. Eel Pie Islanders like to feel separate from their wage-slave neighbours. They are more than a collection of individuals who catch the same train every morning. They are a community. And a sustainable, mixed-use community at that. The island supports everything from guitar-making to stained-glass-making, but the money is in the dirty business of boat-building. Eel Pie is like a social experiment, where leaking houseboats moor alongside architect-designed townhouses. And the well-to-do mix with the down-at-heel. It’s the Thames that brings the Islanders together. Not always under the happiest of circumstances. Before the advent of the Barrier, the place was prone to flooding. “Once I was sitting watching the telly” says Baylis, “and starting to doze off, when I noticed my feet getting hot. I looked down and the water from my swimming pool was round my ankles. Someone said ‘Come over - we’re having a party until the tide goes down’. So I put on my wetsuit, and a sweater, and went out to party. I looked like Max Wall. I sat on the sofa, next to this guy, and said ‘I’ve got my own business’. At the time I was in the swimming pool business. He said ‘I’ve got a business too’. Out of politeness I said ‘What’s that?’. He said ‘Rank Hovis McDougall’. This island is a mix of all sorts.” “You’ve absolutely got to have the right frame of mind” says Bill Double, chairman of the Eel Pie Island Association. “You’ve got to be a kind of beatnik. I first heard about Eel Pie in an advertisement in Daltons Weekly. “‘Come and live on an island’ it said. So we did. And that was back in 1966. Those who come thinking it’s idyllic will leave within a year. That’s happened half-a-dozen times, to my knowledge. Eel Pie doesn’t suit everybody. There are the worries about the water supply, the proximity to your neighbours, and the hassle of getting your shopping home. Although Iceland do deliver door-to-door now. But I think it’s worth any inconvenience. And I certainly wouldn’t like it to change.” But change has now become inevitable. The island’s boat-building tradition has been under threat since Simms’ boatyard - famous for supplying the Oxford and Cambridge boat crews – closed down. Pete Townshend, the guitarist from the Who, used to live in a house overlooking Eel Pie and liked to patronise Simms’ when he could. “Bill [Simms] and I built the second and last of his 55-foot superfast, narrow, low-wash motorboats (designed to carry BBC film-crews behind the boat race). I lost my license one day for driving home drunk from Olympic Studios at four in the morning, and started to moor a little speedboat there that I used to commute. It took about 55 minutes during the day, making phone calls and eating breakfast like a Lord. At night we could get home in 30 minutes. It was wild.” After the closure of Simms’, a fire burnt down the island marine - one of the Thames’ last fully functioning boatyards. The warren of artists’ studios went up as well. Now the site is being redeveloped, and the islanders fear the worst. “95% of Eel Pie is united against the arrival of yuppies” says Double. “Most of us simply want to replace what was lost in the fire. We don’t want our island home turned into the new Docklands with lots of expensive flats thankyou very much. This community depends on its riverside activities, and there’s a very strong desire to maintain the working waterfront. So much of it has been lost to development in recent years. But it’s a struggle which I’m not sure we’re going to win.” In the days before the bridge to the mainland, visitors to Eel Pie would catch a ferry. Well, a four-man rowboat, run by Rosie and her sister. Tuppence onto the island, and tuppence off. Payable in advance, if Rosie didn’t like the look of you. Gladys Heath was fond of taking a day-trip to the island tearooms of a summer afternoon. “This little old lady – I think her name was Ada – used to make her own apple pies. It was a funny little shack of a place, with a wonderful assortment of canaries and bluebirds. I loved it on the island then, but my husband and I didn’t want to have to catch a ferry to work every day. But when the bridge finally went up [in 1957], we decided to move there once and for all.” Gladys, now 91, is Eel Pie’s longest-standing resident. Gladys and her husband built their own house – a self-assembly chalet that she saw advertised in the back of the Sunday Pictorial. “It came over from Norway in 1958, on the same liner as the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree. It changed boats at Tilbury and a big barge dumped it at the end of the garden. We thought it would fit in with the trees. It looked lovely, but part of me was still embarrassed to live on Eel Pie. It had a bit of a reputation. Back when women weren’t liberated, we had three mistresses who lived on the island. I remember one called Auntie Vi. She had big, bad legs. She was in a terrible state when she died. If ever I had to give my name and address, they would say ‘Gladys, I never thought you would have lived over there’. So I tried not to tell anyone.” “I’ve seen some things in my time on this island” she says. “That Trevor Baylis used to give some wild parties. He wouldn’t start until 11pm. The other neighbours used to get furious. He would have topless girls on the roof. Lots of them. He’s got too old now. He’s past it. I think now he’s on television [Baylis presents a slot on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast] he has to get to bed early. In the old days there were lots of punts up and down here. It was lovely. Now that mad beast Trevor has got a couple of speed boats. You couldn’t have a punt on the river with all that going on. Mind you, you wouldn’t want to. My son used to have a fishing net. I would call him ‘Quick! Quick! A mass of tiddlers!’ If you look in the river now, all you see is mud. I wouldn’t want to put my big toe in there today.” But cormorants and herons still loiter in the shallows of Eel Pie. Island bores will tell you that the second largest pike in England was landed near the bridge, and that the tidal mud is home to a rare species of millipede. The island has two tiny nature reserves at either end, and refuses entry to cars and mopeds. A plume of fresh, sea air washes over the island whenever the tide thinks to rise, and the only noise comes from geese and the occasional moorhen. “And the airplanes” says Rowland Morgan, the island’s environmental conscience. “The biggest horror of living here is the blast of noise from Heathrow, and the contrails of the jetliners transiting far overhead. They steal the sunshine, by lacing the sky with cirrus cloud until it’s semi-overcast.” Morgan moved to Eel Pie for the sake of his children. “They have roamed in a way no others can, and that is a rare privilege”. He likes to swim in the Thames - even though the hand-painted signs say it’s dangerous. There are 60 sewage outlets upriver, and Thames Water haven’t screened off all the drains. During heavy storms, the untreated waste pours into the river. So Morgan wisely waits for a prolonged dry spell before pulling on his shorts. “Teddington Lock and Isleworth Lock were built to turn the water around Eel Pie into a semi-tidal boating lake. Now look at it. All the day-trippers on pleasure cruisers. I like to wave to them from the bank outside my house - glad that I am here, and not there with them.” In 1957, Eel Pie discovered jazz. And itself. “On nights when there was jazz at the Eel Pie Hotel, there was a turnstile to get on to the island” says Sandy Scott, who still runs the Lion Boatyard. “But that was wrecked by hooligans. So they put a woman on guard. One cold winter, they put an oil stove in her tin hut and her fur coat caught fire. She was 70, but she took the money home in a little wicker basket on wheels. Nobody ever touched her.” The young Baylis remembers it well. “But it all went downhill after Acker Bilk played here. We were jazz purists you see. I remember coming over the bridge one night in 1962. I heard this electric music and thought ‘Jesus, what the hell is that?’ I turned on my heels. I didn’t know it, but that was the first gig by the Rolling Stones.” It wasn’t just the music that attracted the youngsters. Or the Eel Pie Hotel’s sprung maple dancefloor. It was the cheap cider. And the atmosphere. “We would all turn up on the mainland in our sports cars” says Baylis. “Inner tubes hanging out of the wheels. Everybody was drunk in charge, and all the girls were dressed in woad - black eyes, black lips, black stockings. Joints were in abundance. But hey man it was the 60s. And sex! If you wanted to get your leg over, you came to Eel Pie Island. There was a real spirit of freedom about the place. I think I probably spent more time in the clinic than I did listening to music.” After a string of negative press reports, the Eel Pie Hotel lost its licence – but the youngsters didn’t want to go home. So they set up a commune. “The so-called ‘hippies’ actually developed quickly into drug-addicts and thieves” says Townshend. “As a rock star I felt quite at home with them, though they often woke me at five in the morning for tea bags.” Ted Leppard, who still runs the island’s biggest boatyard, remembers seeing teepees on the Hotel lawn. “And hippies running round in the altogether. A few years ago, this very respectable gentleman came to the boatyard with two grown-up children. He said ‘I was one of the last people to live in that Hotel’. I said ‘But it was all bloody hippies’. He said ‘I was one of those hippies’. I couldn’t believe it. I said ‘You weren't living in a teepee, running around in the altogether were you? He said ‘I was. But don't tell the wife’.” “Mammon arrived in 1970” says Baylis - the year the builders started to clear the Hotel site. And begin work on Aquarius. “It’s where the posh folk live” says Baylis. “I go and see them when I want a letter written. It was built much to our disgust, to be honest. I acquired a lot of the bricks to build my house from that site. Their soundproofing isn’t because of me. Now I say I live at Number 19 Aquarius. A lot of them came onto the island with Qwa Qwa accents, and they were simply in the way. We don’t have a lot of time for la-de-das. They were rich, we were poor.” It’s the first time I’ve heard a millionaire declare himself poor - apart from when he’s writing to the taxman. “Well, I’m still the same bloke I always was. I can’t change my blood line. My family goes all the way back to the broom cupboard.” The fire at the Eel Pie Marine in November 1996 accelerated the island’s gentrification. “There was a Guy Fawkes party going on when suddenly – from among the noise of the fireworks – came this sound of shouting” says Bill Double. “The Marine was in flames and, if the wind had changed direction, the whole island would have gone up. The place was full of gas cylinders. The fire brigade had to run their hoses across the bridge because there wasn’t enough water pressure on the island. It took all night to finally put out the fire.” The islanders tried to raise funds to replace what was lost. There was even talk of Pink Floyd and The Who playing a fund-raising benefit at the Twickenham rugby ground. But it was only talk. In the end it amounted to nothing. “When I heard the old Marine had burned down” says Townshend “I'm afraid I was sorry, but unwilling to help financially. That kind of setup must survive on its own feet or not at all. It is not just developers who threaten Eel Pie Island, but island people running away from the world who still want access to M&S. They aren’t all as accessible or affable as Trevor in my experience, though I may be doing the present community an injustice. At one time before I bought the Boathouse at Isleworth, I tried to buy the Marine for my own studio use. I'm glad I didn’t. Its years as an artistic and marine community were wonderful. Quite a few musicians had little computer studios there. The fire was a real tragedy.” Margaret Morrison, an island artist, lost more than 40 paintings in the fire. She moved to temporary studio space in the wheelhouse of a converted trawler. It had been left on the island when the trawler was converted into a houseboat. It wasn’t insulated – and the only heat was from a single-bar electric fire. “Working there wasn’t easy” says Morrison. “I got rain coming down the funnel, and splashing onto my paintings. But it suited my mood after the fire.There were people - including Trevor – who said the mess left by the fire was an eyesore. He just wanted to get rid of it. But I had to learn to ‘let go’ first. So I did this big canvas of Kali - the goddess of destruction. I went up the staircase of the burnt-out marine topless because I wanted to feel I was exposing myself. Then I set fire to my painting. It really helped me.” Others have channelled their feelings in different ways. But most are united in opposition to any residential development on the old Marine. “I do worry about yuppies on Eel Pie” says Baylis. “We don’t want this place to become the birthplace of the garden gnome. We don’t want it to become like Peacehaven. Do you follow me? We don’t want it to be fine women in Laura Ashley prints. Since my invention, I can call the CO Jack. I can call the Commanding Officer by his first name. But we don’t judge anyone by the cut of their cloth here. Which is just as well in my case. There’s an expression I’m fond of - ‘I don’t mind anyone looking down on me, as long as they don’t expect me to be looking up at them’. I want Eel Pie to stay like that.” The planning permission is for three large business premises, a block of studios and a slipway. The studios may have kitchens. And toilets. Islanders argue that – with the minimum of adaptation – they can be converted to apartments. And it won’t be complicated to change their lease from light industrial to residential. Leppard, who runs the boatyard next door, will refuse to let it happen. “We will object to anything residential” he says. “If we have houses, how long before they say we can't make noise? Take Docklands. The boats used to host parties at night. No complaints. Now residents are ringing up the port of London and complaining about the noise. Yet they are the ones intruding on the river. It's like people who go to the country, and complain about the cocks crowing. Henry Cope-Harrison, the architect/developer who owns the marine site, has yet to decide what the development will look like. “I don’t think Eel Pie is the right place for three large business premises. Access through Ted Leppard’s boat yard is difficult - at best he tolerates us, and at worst he's downright antagonistic – and a large company wouldn’t put up with that.” So Cope-Harrison wants permission to build more studios instead. “I don’t think the studios will attract yuppies. They will appeal to people who are slightly unconventional. People who are keen to determine their own environment. Very Eel Pie. I know it takes time to win people's confidence. I won't win the confidence of Ted Leppard, but the other islanders will realise that I'm no threat to the Eel Pie way of life.” Leppard isn’t convinced. “The government need to say ‘From now on, no developer can build on a boatyard’. If you take every boatyard away, you'll kill the Thames. Look at Richmond, Teddington, Mortlake - they have all been developed. I can understand why. Running a boatyard isn't a mega money game. If a property developer comes along and says ‘I'll give you two-and-a-half million quid for your boatyard’, what fool is going to say no? I'm the exception. But there’s more to life than money. What good is it? You either drink yourself stupid, or end up in trouble. I’m not well. I suffer from hypertension. The arsehole who owns the Marine is getting me all wound up. But I'm not going to let him destroy something which has been there hundreds of years. Eel Pie is too special for that.”

		© Richard Johnson 2000 - 2009