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

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Eel Pie Island, seen from Twickenham, West London, is a throwback San Francisco-on-the-Thames only open two or three times a year and home to a bohemian assortment of creatives. Photo: Stephen McCarty

Published: 4:00pm, 23 Jul 2024

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.

Well, some exist – and one of them is a speck of rock in west London’s River Thames. The private, mostly residential Eel Pie Island is an improbable blend of all the best, reality-defying bits of Lamma Island, the 1960s, San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill and those few square metres of Ubud, Bali, not yet defiled by tourist buses.

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.

Boatyard and art gallery, Eel Pie Island. Photo: Stephen McCarty

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.

An outdoor bar on Eel Pie Island. Photo: Stephen McCarty

With it went a chunk of music history: the hotel had hosted performances by The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Who, Eric Clapton and numerous other future titans. But their connection with the island is at least commemorated in the Eel Pie Island Museum, back across the water in Twickenham.