Isleworth escorts in TW7, from Church Street down to the water

The village where the road runs out

Church Street ends at the water and it has been ending there for several hundred years. The London Apprentice stands on the corner and has been serving drinks since long before anybody thought of putting a trunk road through the parish. All Saints church next to it burned in 1943 and was rebuilt around its medieval tower, which is why the building looks like two arguments stitched together. From the windows you watch the tide climb the slipway towards the Ait, and several times a month it comes up over the road itself and everybody moves their drinks and their cars without fuss.

Further along at the bottom of Swan Street, the Town Wharf has a terrace hanging over the river, and on a rising tide that terrace is the best free entertainment in TW7. None of this is a night out in the ordinary sense. It is a village with a river at the end of it, which is precisely why people book it.

Three ways in, and none of them is the tube

Isleworth station is three minutes from the village on foot and runs South Western Railway trains, about thirty five minutes into Waterloo. Syon Lane is twelve minutes away on the same line and handier for the Great West Road hotels. Osterley, on the Piccadilly line, is a twenty minute walk and is the option people use when they want a tube rather than a timetable.

The last train back into town leaves a little after midnight, which gives an evening here a natural shape rather than a hard stop. After that it is a car down the Great West Road, twenty five minutes at night and considerably more in the afternoon.

Where the rooms are

The Tudor style hotel at TW7 5NA has a garden behind it that most guests never find, and it is the one place along that stretch where a conversation can be held at a normal volume. Five minutes east, TW8 0GP and TW8 8GA sit on the Brentford side and are equally practical from here.

Not one of these is a partner, and we have never asked any of them to be. They are on this page because they are the addresses people give when they book. Houses and flats across TW7 are at least as common, and the village itself is almost entirely residential.

The shape of an evening here

Daylight helps more in Isleworth than anywhere else on this site, because the river is the point and the river needs light. A five o'clock start gets you a walk down Church Street, a table by a window while the tide does its work, and dinner either in the village or ten minutes up towards Brentford. A nine o'clock start gets you a good dinner and a dark river, which is a different and perfectly decent evening.

Quiet is the offer. If you want noise, Brentford is ten minutes away and Richmond is twenty. If you want somewhere where nothing much happens beautifully, you are in the right postcode.

Companions anchored in TW7

Cindy likes the river best at low tide, with the mud showing and the pub half empty, and she will tell you what the plaque on the wall says before you have asked. Nora walks Swan Street slowly every time, rain included, and checks the tide table without embarrassment; she is back on the twenty ninth of September. Violetta takes the Great West Road end, a garden behind a hotel and then dinner down in the village, and she books long rather than short.

Laura and Vanessa are both a few minutes away in Osterley, and Patricia comes along the river from Brentford. Portraits for all of them are in On The Route.

The neighbours

Osterley shares this postcode and adds a park, a house and a Piccadilly line station. Brentford is ten minutes downstream with a canal, a stadium and considerably more going on. The TW3 town centre is fifteen minutes by bus and has the shops. Across the water and round by road, Twickenham is twenty minutes and is the prettier version of the same river.