London’s Alleys: Banksian Way, TW7

A few minutes walk from Isleworth station in southwest London is a residential alley that looks nice but fairly unadorned until you spot the metal arch in the middle.

What’s that doing here?

Well, what looks like an alley created when housing was added predates the houses and was once the path to a grand country house, once owned by a botanist whose fame has faded in the UK, although he’s still well known in Australia.

The country mansion was Spring Grove House, which, in 1779, the wealthy Joseph Banks bought in addition to his existing home in Soho. Banks had inherited great wealth but was also fascinated with nature and botany, becoming a noted scientist in his own right and often funding other scientists to accompany him on voyages of discovery.

He was president of the Royal Society for over 41 years and advised King George III on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. By sending botanists around the world to collect plants, he made Kew the world’s leading botanical garden. He is well known in Australia, having been on James Cook’s first voyage, and later was a strong advocate of British colonisation of Australia.

He died at Spring Grove House in 1820, just over 40 years after he had bought it, and it was later inherited by the local reformer Henry Pownall, then sold to local property developer Henry Daniel Davies, and later by the heir to the Pears soap fortune, Andrew Pears who substantially enlarged the house.

It was used as a hospital during WWI and, after the war, was handed to Middlesex County Council for use in schools and colleges. Today, the site is the West Thames College.

Jumping back to when the area was still largely fields and a mansion house, it was Henry Daniel Davies who started developing the area into housing. Initially, the manor house estate wasn’t affected, and he developed housing on The Grove, a road that runs up along the boundary of the manor estate, with housing only on the eastern side.

It’s likely that this is also when the main entrance to the manor house was created, with a long driveway off The Grove, with a lodge at the entrance, and the gates further down.

It seems likely that an interim owner later sold off a slice of land in the 1910s for housing. They developed Harvard Road running through the estate, and it was then that the manor house driveway was turned into an alley between the two roads.

OS Map 1894
OS Map 1912
OS Map 1935

Today, you can still see the old lodge house on the corner of The Grove and Banksian Way, and looking at the alley it’s lined with rows of exceptionally tall trees, likely from when it was the driveway to the manor house. Do listen to the road, there’s a pretty large water mains underneath, and on my visit on a dry day you could still hear the water rushing under the manhole cover. Possibly from the water spring that once gave the house its name.

Looking around, there seems to be the remains of an old rock garden or pathway in the undergrowth on the southern side. This may be from the old manor house or something added when the houses were built up around it, but it’s hard to be sure.

Then you come to the original gate entry to the manor house, now marooned half-way along the alley, through which you can see the remains of the manor house, past the modern gates to the college. The old gateway arch lifts the alley from routine gap between post-war housing developments into something that has a memory of history — and as it turns out a link with one of the country’s leading botanists.

The alley doesn’t seem to have an official name, but it shows up on Google Maps and in a few books, such as Banksian Way, which is quite appropriate.

The college building is sometimes open during Open House London, so you can see both the house and the driveway that used to lead to it.