IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Herons Place, ISLEWORTH, TW7 7BE

Viewed from further up the Thames Path towards Brentford.

Looking upstream at low tide. On the left is B.J.Wood & Son boat builders. On the right are houses on Herons Place and in the centre distance is Gordon House.

A short sidestreet leading down to the riverbank from the A3004. The area between this road and Swan Street is occupied by a modern development of offices and business premises which includes a branch of LA Fitness. Visible at the end of the road is the grey roof of B.J.Wood & Son, a boat builders located on Isleworth Ait.

Isleworth Ait is a long wooded island in the tidal Thames. Apart from these moorings, there is no development on it and it is managed as a nature reserve by the London Wildlife Trust.

Isleworth Ait is one of several islands in this reach of the River Thames. The 3.5 hectare island is uninhabited and only accessible by boat. It is a Local Nature Reserve (LNR) managed by the London Wildlife Trust, and their website page describing the island and its natural habitat is here http://www.wildlondon.org.uk/reserve.php?reserve_id=95. It used to belong to the Duke of Northumberland. There are a couple of boat maintenance yards here on the western side of the island.

Grade II listed. http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-438395-nazareth-house-hounslow

Started by Benjamin Wood in 1962, B J Wood & Son boatyard is a traditional family business. Passed to Ben’s son Robert, and eventually to the current owner, Ben’s grandson Stephen Wood, three generations have now worked on building and repairing boats on the site at Isleworth Ait. The core business in the early years involved repairing wooden boats and building small motor boats. Ben Wood bought an old meat-storage barge and built a workshop on top of it, which continues to be used today. Over time the yard has doubled in size, and currently has four floating dry docks for maintaining vessels. Work at the boatyard is seasonal. In the summer, they focus on repairing and renovating houseboats, from static homes to Dutch barges. In the winter, when conditions are more challenging, the yard maintain passenger boats whilst out of peak season. Being a floating boatyard, all docking are worked around the tides, and supplies have to be carried across the Thames when the tide is low, or craned onto small boats. Above taken from the website of the Thames Festival Trust: https://thamesfestivaltrust.org/our-work/heritage-programme/working-river/isleworth

Barges on the banks of the river and Isleworth Ait grounded in the mud by an ebbing tide.

View upstream from Town Wharf - with the Ait (an island in mid-river) on the left. As with many other places along the Thames, Isleworth riverside has changed greatly in the last fifty years, boatyards, scrapyards and other industrial uses giving way to polite residential development. But gentrification has not yet reached the Ait - along the shore of the island there are still boatbuilders' premises and moorings for a motley assortment of river-going vessels.