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Glasbrook Avenue, TWICKENHAM, TW2 6AH

A typical street for this area, mixed semis and bungalows. Typical sky too with all those cloud trails. Heathrow Airport is just west of here. Glasbrook is a place near Swansea.

Just a bit of nameboard trivia here. Painted out but still obvious on this street name sign is the insignia of the former local authority for this area, the borough of Twickenham. This ceased as a separate body in 1965, merging into the London borough of Richmond. Facts and figures on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_Borough_of_Twickenham Glasbrook is a place near Swansea.

A high level mill stream returns to join the natural course of the River Crane. This is on the site of the old Hounslow Powder Mills, long gone, but leaving an intriguing network of waterways, humps and hollows.

Apart from the housing, another feature typical of suburban streets is the heavy duty surgery applied to any tree that's getting too big. This looks like a horse chestnut, already suffering from blight. How much can a tree take? This is on one of the roadside bits of the London Loop long distance path.

This is near the end of the lengthy leat that supplied the mills set above the main mill pond. Other mills were powered from the pond at a lower level.

This is A314 Hanworth Road - just in Richmond. From here there is a pleasant walk and cycleway beside the River Crane for two miles to Twickenham, ending through Kneller Gardens to Craneford Road by The Stoop and Richmond Upon Thames College.

This outdoor classroom in Crane Park would be especially delightful on a glorious day such as this one. It is located in Crane Park, close to Hanworth Road.

This runs closely parallel to the main route of the river, which is just beyond the vegetation on the left bank. Separating the two routes is therefore a long very narrow island. Various buildings of the old gunpowder mills used to be on the right bank, and the 1874 map shows many small inlets made at right angles to this bank, some associated with buildings. This river branch is lower than the leat supplying the western set of mills, at the same level as the pond supplying the eastern set of mills. It seems very likely from the circumstances that this waterway was made for navigation, for transport from the main manufacturing area to rather spaced out buildings along the right bank here. These were probably magazines. There exists in Hounslow Local Studies Library an illustration c1795 showing a small punt with three items of cargo being navigated upstream on the mill pond. This may have been artistic licence, but the waterside features visible in this view and on maps point towards it being realistic. See http://www.hounslow.info/libraries/local-history-archives/charles-dickens/charles-dickens-and-hounslow-3/ .

Crane Park Island is an area between the river Crane and a mill stream cut to power gunpowder mills which operated here until 1926. The main flow goes down the channel on the left in this picture. The right hand channel is the mill leat, which although it looks wider here is now silted up and overgrown and carries only a small flow. Remains of the powder mills can still be seen on the island. There are some foundations, water channels and mill wheel bays still visible in the undergrowth. The island is now a nature reserve run by the London Wildlife Trust.