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From Henry VIII to the Rolling Stones, Eel Pie Island has drawn people for centuries, curious about what life is like on a small patch of ground surrounded by the River Thames.
Yet the 100 or so people who live and work on the island believe their unique community is now under threat from the casual stroke of a bureaucratic pen.
On Monday planning inspectors will deliver their verdict on a 341-page document that sets out what sort of buildings the London borough of Richmond-upon-Thames requires.
It includes a section on flood risks caused by the Thames, which rises and falls according to the tides. For an hour or so each day, the river floods the Twickenham embankment opposite Eel Pie Island until the tide recedes, as it has done ever since the footbridge on to the island was built in 1957. But the tides do not affect the islanders, whose houses are raised up and protected by flood defence walls.
The islanders say that a change to the local plan will mean that their homes will be classified as being in a flood zone, making it difficult or impossible for them to remortgage their properties or obtain insurance, and businesses on the island will not be able to secure loans against their buildings.
“We’ve been working with water for hundreds of years here,” said Celia Holman, an island resident and committee member of the River Thames Society. “We’re the custodians.” Walking across the bridge on to the island, she points out the flood defences around every home – thick brick and stone garden walls, and fittings for metal plates that can be slotted into front gates if water levels rise.
In the days of watermen rowing passengers up and down the Thames in the 16th century, the island was known as Twickenham Ait, and Henry VIII is thought to have stopped at an inn here on his journeys to Hampton Court.
It was renamed Eel Pie Island by 19th century tour operators selling day trips to Londoners; the hotel built in 1830 was supposedly a good place for gentlemen to accommodate their mistresses, according to the Eel Pie Island museum.
It became a part of rock history in 1956 when the hotel was turned into the Eelpiland dance club, hosting a five-month residency by the Rolling Stones in 1963. David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Eric Clapton played there, and Rod Stewart was recruited to the Hoochie Coochie Men after meeting Long John Baldry following a gig. The club shut in 1967, to be replaced by a hippy commune, and when the building burned down in 1970 it was replaced by apartments.
Holman’s home is at the corner of the old hotel site, and the island now is a mix of housing, offices and artists’ studios and a boatyard, with a counter-cultural undertone not unlike Copenhagen’s Christiania.
“There is incredible economic diversity – a broad spectrum of people that come here. When we had a doctor and a dentist, I thought ‘right, we can declare independence’,” Holman says. “It’s a vibrant, changing, evolving place.”
She describes the new local plan as a “computer-says-no-approach”. “And that results in a derelict island. If people cannot mortgage or insure a property, they can’t sell it, which means no one will move in, which means the island will wither away.”
Holly Tucker, founder of Not On The High Street, runs her Holly & Co business from the island. She said: “This is just shortsighted; it is utterly pointless and it makes me furious that we have such policies that have not been thought through and will harm the island. What if the island becomes derelict because people can’t get mortgages, the insurances to be on the island? We’re a thriving part of the Twickenham community.”
Henry Harrison, architect, resident and a founder of the indie band the Mystery Jets, said it would become “incredibly difficult” to improve the island. “The island’s adapted over centuries to become what it is now,” he said. “It’s the most famous island on the river. It’s a flagship for London and for Richmond. They’re sabotaging themselves by trying to restrict the use of the islands and the future development.”
The islanders’ attempts to engage with Richmond council have not been very successful, because the council believes nothing has really changed. The new plan contains a single line defining that the floodplain starts at Teddington, where a weir prevents tidal waters flowing farther upstream.
The change, it said, happened after the Environment Agency pointed out an “inconsistency” in how the previous version treated the islands downstream – including Eel Pie Island – and it needed to be updated to “incorporate” the islands.
But faced with the protests, the council said that other parts of the document show the islands were already considered to be part of the flood zone, so nothing had changed.
Which leaves the islanders asking why, if nothing about the policy is changing, Richmond needs to issue a new one. In fact, the residents are already seeing changes, Holman said. “We’ve already had planning applications turned down against the background [of the new plan],” she said. “Changes of use, extensions that would have been allowed previously.” And the reason given for the rejection is the risk of flooding – something that was not raised in dozens of previous applications that had been approved, she said.
Richmond council said it was for the planning inspector to make a decision about the local plan and said there was a “longstanding policy approach to the sets of islands on the Thames”.
An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “Eel Pie Island has an interesting and unique history and we are committed to working with the residents and business to understand and best prepare for present and future flood risk.”
