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Tulse Hill

Tulse Hill is a district in the London Borough of Lambeth in South London that sits on Brockwell Park. It is approximately five miles from Charing Cross and is bordered by Brixton, Dulwich, Herne Hill, Streatham and West Norwood.

History
The area known as Tulse Hill is part of the former Manor or Manors of Bodley, Upgroves and Scarlettes whose precise boundaries are now uncertain. The name of the area comes from the Tulse family who came into ownership of farmland in the area during the period of the Commonwealth in the 1650s. Sir Henry Tulse was Lord Mayor of London in 1683 and his daughter Elizabeth married Richard Onslow, 1st Baron Onslow. The land remained in Onslow ownership until 1789 when most of it was purchased by William Cole. The estate was further divided on Cole's death in 1807.

The western part was left to "Mercy Cressingham, spinster" (now commemorated by the Cressingham Gardens estate in the area) and the eastern part -now mostly occupied by Brockwell Park - was left to Richard Ogbourne who promptly sold it on to John Blades.

In 1810 Tulse Hill Farm was the only building in the western part of the area. The enclosure of land in the parish of Lambeth in 1811 led to the construction of Effra Road in the area immediately to the north. Together with improvements to Brixton Road by the local turnpike trust this greatly improved road communications with central London, and the value of the local landholdings.

Mercy Cressingham eventually married Dr Thomas Edwards, who took the initiative in buying extra land to make an access from Brixton Hill in 1814 and laying out two new roads, Lower Tulse Hill Road (now known simply as Tulse Hill) and Upper Tulse Hill Road (now Upper Tulse Hill), by 1821. A plan of 1821 in the RIBA Library shows a proposed speculative development of both the Edwards estate and the adjacent Blades estate with large detached villas, although only the former actually came to fruition. The new roads were adopted by the parish in 1822.

An 1832 map shows that Tulse Hill still had only a few buildings on the new roads in contrast to nearby recently developed areas in Brixton and Norwood and the longer established hamlet of Dulwich. However, by 1843, there was a continuous line of houses, predominantly detached and usually with separate coach houses along the full length of Lower Tulse Hill Road from Brixton to the top of the hill.

Development of the area to the east of this road commenced in 1845 when Trinity Rise was built to connect Upper Tulse Hill with Norwood Road. Holy Trinity Church on Trinity Rise was built in 1855-6 and is now grade II listed.

Major development of the area further east did not come until the opening of the Herne Hill and Tulse Hill railway stations in the 1860s.

Most of the original villas with large gardens on the original Edwards-Cressingham landholding have been redeveloped at much higher densities for council housing since the 1930s.

The most prominent survival of 19th century Tulse Hill is Berry House, later called Silwood Hall, and now forming the front part of St Martin-In-The-Fields High School for Girls, a Church of England secondary school which has outlasted the nearby 1950s schools.

The redevelopment of Tulse Hill after World War II by the London County Council had included the construction of two large secondary schools - Tulse Hill School and Dick Sheppard School (originally for girls only). Both schools have now closed, and their sites have been redeveloped for housing of very contrasting types. The Dick Sheppard School site was redeveloped as Brockwell Gate, a gated Regency style with houses and apartments overlooking Brockwell Park. The site of Tulse Hill school was redeveloped as affordable housing.

Politics
Tulse Hill is represented on the Lambeth London Borough Council by councillors for the Brixton Rush Common, St Martin's, and West Dulwich wards. All three wards are held by the Labour Party although the ward now known as West Dulwich was historically a Conservative ward until the 2014 Lambeth London Borough Council election. Tulse Hill is represented in the London Assembly by Marina Ahmad and in Westminster by Helen Hayes and Bell Ribeiro-Addy.

In March 2022 Lambeth Council initiated a consultation with residents as to renaming the area, to avoid a possible association with Henry Tulse who was once a board member of the Royal African Company, a slave-trading concern in the seventeenth century.

Buses
The area is served by London Buses routes 2, 68, 196, 201, 322, 415, 432, 468 and P13.

Rail
Tulse Hill railway station (Zone 3) is served by the Southern Metro via Peckham Rye line (to London Bridge) and the Thameslink Wimbledon loop (to St Albans via Blackfriars, City Thameslink, Farringdon, and St Pancras). The railway bridge over the A205 was frequently subject to vehicle strikes until a new warning system was installed in 2017.

Nearby stations provide services to Victoria from Herne Hill and West Dulwich (via the Southeastern Metro Bromley South line) and from West Norwood (via the Southern Crystal Palace line).

The nearest London Underground station is Brixton on the Victoria line.

Roads
At the southern end of Tulse Hill is a major road junction between the A204 (Tulse Hill), A205 (South Circular) and the A215 (Norwood Road) where the historic Tulse Hill Hotel stands.

Cultural references in literature
The "Tulse Hill Parliament", a political club, features in P. G. Wodehouse's comic novel Psmith in the City. The author attended Dulwich College, which is in the vicinity.

Noel Streatfeild's novel "Tennis Shoes" (1937) is written about a family who live in Tulse Hill.

Samson Young, protagonist in Martin Amis's London Fields goes to Tulse Hill to buy drugs.

Jason Strugnell, a fictional poet in Wendy Cope's Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis, lives in Tulse Hill and mentions it a couple of times in "his" poems.

Tulse Hill and its surrounding areas are locations in Mark Billingham's crime novel "In The Dark".

Prominent buildings

 * Brockwell Hall - built 1811–1813, grade II listed.
 * Brockwell Lido - opened 1938, grade II listed.
 * Carisbrooke - mid 19th century villa, grade II listed.
 * Holy Trinity Church, Trinity Rise - built 1855–6, grade II listed.
 * St Martin-In-The-Fields High School for Girls - built mid 19th century, grade II listed.
 * Strand School - Grammar School building, opened in 1913 in Elm Park; it is now called Elm Court School.
 * 166 Tulse Hill - early-mid 19th century villa, grade II listed.

Notable people

 * Julian Cope, lead singer of band Teardrop Explodes, lived at 149a Tulse Hill in the late 1980s where, as he described in his autobiography Repossessed, he had a 40 ft Scalextric track and an extensive collection of Corgi, Dinky and other toy cars.
 * Michael Finnissy, composer
 * Sir William Henry Harris was a chorister at Holy Trinity Church towards the end of the 19th century.
 * The astronomers Sir William Huggins and his wife Margaret Lindsay, Lady Huggins, had a home and observatory known as Huggins' Observatory from about 1850 until 1915 at 90 Upper Tulse Hill. It no longer stands but was at the approximate location of today's Vibart Gardens.
 * The Ionides family lived there between 1838 and 1864. Alexander Constantine Ionides was Greek consul, art patron and donor. His son Constantine Alexander Ionides left his collection of Old Masters to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
 * Mick Jones, guitarist in The Clash, lived in Christchurch House on Christchurch Road with his aunt during his childhood years.
 * Arthur Mee (1875–1943), British writer, journalist and educator, author of The King's England and The Children's Encyclopædia.
 * Jean Charles de Menezes (1978–2005), Brazilian man killed by officers of the Metropolitan Police at Stockwell station after he was wrongly deemed to be involved in the previous day's failed bombing attempts.
 * John Sentamu, previous Archbishop of York, was vicar of Holy Trinity Church for 13 years.
 * Euan Uglow, artist

title: Tulse Hill


text:
Twickenham

Twickenham is a suburban district in London, England. It is situated on the River Thames 9.9 miles southwest of Charing Cross. Historically part of Middlesex, it has formed part of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames since 1965, and the borough council's administrative headquarters are located in the area.

The population, including St Margarets and Whitton, was 62,148 at the 2011 census.

Twickenham is the home of the Rugby Football Union, with hundreds of thousands of spectators visiting Twickenham Stadium each year. The historic riverside area has a network of 18th-century buildings and pleasure grounds, many of which have survived intact.

This area has three grand period mansions with public access: York House, Marble Hill and Strawberry Hill House. Another has been lost, that belonging to 18th-century aphoristic poet Alexander Pope, who was known as the Bard of Twickenham. Strawberry Hill, the Neo-Gothic prototype home of Horace Walpole is linked with the oldest Roman Catholic university in the country, St Mary's University.

Pre-Norman
Excavations have revealed settlements in the area dating from the Early Neolithic, possibly Mesolithic, periods. Occupation seems to have continued through the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the Roman occupation. The area was first mentioned (as "Tuican hom" and "Tuiccanham") in an 8th-century charter to cede the area to Waldhere, Bishop of London, "for the salvation of our souls". The charter, dated 13 June 704, is signed with 12 crosses. The signatories included Swaefred of Essex, Cenred of Mercia and Earl Paeogthath.

Norman
In Norman times Twickenham was part of the Manor of Isleworth – itself part of the Hundred of Hounslow, Middlesex (mentioned in Domesday Book of 1086). The manor had belonged to Ælfgār, Earl of Mercia in the time of Edward the Confessor, but was granted to Walter de Saint-Valery (Waleric) by William I of England after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. The area was farmed, while the river provided opportunities for fishing, boatbuilding and trade.

17th century
Bubonic plague spread to the town in 1665 and 67 deaths were recorded. It appears that Twickenham had a pest house in the 17th century, although the location is not known.

There was also a watch house in the middle of the town, with stocks, a pillory and a whipping post whose owner was charged to "ward within and about this Parish and to keep all Beggars and Vagabonds that shall lye abide or lurk about the Towne and to give correction to such...".

In 1633 construction began on York House. It was occupied by Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester in 1656 and later by Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon.

1659 saw the first mention of the Twickenham Ferry, although ferrymen had already been operating in the area for many generations. Sometime before 1743 a "pirate" ferry appears to have been started by Twickenham inhabitants. There is speculation that it operated to serve "The Folly", a floating hostelry of some kind. Several residents wrote to the Lord Mayor of the City of London:

"...Complaining that there is lately fixed near the Shore of Twickenham on the River Thames a Vessell made like a Barge and called the Folly wherein divers[e] loose and disorderly persons are frequently entertained who have behaved in a very indecent Manner and do frequently afront divers[e] persons of Fashion and Distinction who often in an Evening Walk near that place, and desired so great a Nuisance might be removed,...."

18th and 19th centuries
In 1713 the nave of the ancient St Mary's Church collapsed, and the church was rebuilt in the Neo-classical style to designs by a local architect, John James.

In 1736, the noted pharmacist and quack doctor Joshua Ward set up the Great Vitriol Works to produce sulphuric acid, using a process discovered in the seventeenth century by Johann Glauber in which sulphur is burned together with saltpetre (potassium nitrate), in the presence of steam. The process generates an extremely unpleasant smell, which caused objections from local residents. The area was also soon home to the world's first industrial production facility for gunpowder, on a site between Twickenham and Whitton on the banks of the River Crane. There were frequent explosions and loss of life. On 11 March 1758, one of two explosions was felt in Reading, Berkshire, and in April 1774 another explosion terrified people at church in Isleworth.

In 1772 three mills blew up, shattering glass and buildings in the neighbourhood. Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, wrote complaining to his friend and relative Henry Seymour Conway, then Lieutenant General of the Ordnance, that all the decorative painted glass had been blown out of his windows at Strawberry Hill.

The city of Huntsville, Alabama was first settled as Twickenham in 1805. In 1811 the name was changed to its present name of Huntsville. It was named after Twickenham, the home of founder LeRoy Pope’s kinsman, Alexander Pope. The name is still used today as a neighborhood and a Historical District.

The powder mills remained in operation until 1927 when they were closed. Much of the site is now occupied by Crane Park, in which the old Shot Tower, mill sluices and blast embankments can still be seen. Much of the area along the river next to the Shot Tower is now a nature reserve.

The 1818 Enclosure Award led to the development of 182 acre of land to the west of the town centre largely between the present day Staines and Hampton Roads, where new roads – Workhouse Road, Middle Road, 3rd, 2nd and 1st Common Roads (now First to Fifth Cross Roads respectively) – were laid out. During the 18th and 19th centuries, a number of fine houses were built and Twickenham became a popular place of residence for people of "fashion and distinction". Further development was stimulated by the opening of Twickenham station in 1848.

In 1898 some buildings on London Road, near the east end of King Street, were demolished, and a new road was built, in order to relieve congestion on the older Church Street. This new road was named York Street and opened on 1 March 1899.

20th and 21st centuries
Electricity was introduced to Twickenham in 1902 and the first trams arrived the following year.

In 1939, when All Hallows Lombard Street was demolished in the City of London, its distinctive stone tower designed by Christopher Wren, with its peal of ten bells and connecting stone cloister, and the interior furnishings, including a Renatus Harris organ and a pulpit used by John Wesley, were brought to Twickenham to be incorporated in the new All Hallows Church on Chertsey Road (A316) near Twickenham Stadium.

There was a high-profile murder on 19 August 2004, when French woman Amelie Delagrange (aged 22) died in hospital after being found with a serious head injury (caused by battery) in the Twickenham Green area. Within 24 hours, police had established a link with the murder of Marsha McDonnell, who was killed in similar circumstances in nearby Hampton 18 months earlier. Levi Bellfield was found guilty of both murders on 25 February 2008 (as well as a further charge of attempted murder against 18-year-old Kate Sheedy) and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2011 he was found guilty of the murder of Milly Dowler, a teenage girl who vanished from Walton-on-Thames in March 2002 and whose body was later found in Hampshire woodland.

Governance
From 1888 the area was administered jointly between the newly formed Middlesex County Council and the Twickenham Local Government District board, which had been established with the passing of the Local Government Act 1858. Under the Local Government Act 1894 the area became Twickenham Urban District. In 1926 Twickenham was granted a charter of incorporation to become a municipal borough. Eleven years later the urban district councils of Teddington, Hampton & Hampton Wick merged with Twickenham. In 1965 Middlesex County Council was abolished and replaced with the Greater London Council, and the boroughs of Twickenham, Richmond and Barnes were combined to form the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. In 1986 the Greater London Council was abolished and most powers devolved to local boroughs and others to the Government and joint boards. In 2000 the Greater London Authority was set up and two-tier administration returned, but with the top tier having a much more limited strategic role.

The borough council offices and chamber are located at York House, Twickenham and in the adjacent civic centre.

The Twickenham constituency in the UK Parliament includes the towns of Twickenham, St Margarets, Whitton, Teddington, Hampton, Fulwell, Hampton Hill and Hampton Wick. Since the 2019 UK General Election, the Member of Parliament (MP) has been a Liberal Democrat, Munira Wilson.

Economy
As Twickenham is a London suburb, many local residents commute to central London or work locally in retail, hospitality, education or for one of the many professional firms based in the area. London Heathrow Airport is important to the local economy both through direct employment and the cluster of international firms that have their European headquarters in the Thames Valley area. Unemployment in the area is very low, however there is a big difference in the salaries earned by residents who work inside the borough, compared to those whose employment is based outside.

The council has been making efforts to regenerate Twickenham town centre which has been struggling due to strong competition from Hounslow, Richmond and Kingston upon Thames. It differs from most town centres as it has fewer retail shops, particularly chain stores, and more cafes, restaurants, banks and estate agents. There has been a comprehensive scheme of town centre improvements including repaving in Yorkstone, a new arts centre, and improved gardens and riverside walk. However, plans to build a barge house for Gloriana at Orleans Gardens and to move the youth centre out of Heatham House so the building could be converted into a hotel proved controversial and were dropped.

Population and housing
Data for 1891–1961 is available for the Urban Sanitary District, that was then the Metropolitan Borough which always included Whitton. This area temporarily expanded for 31 years to include Hampton and Teddington from 1935, rising from 2421 acres to 7,014 acres. The 2001 and 2011 Censuses give detailed information about the town/district. The settlement's population in 2011 were living in 22,273 households.

In terms of ethnicity (as of 2011 census), the majority of people in all four wards identified themselves as White British, ranging between 71% of the population in Twickenham Riverside to 78% in South Twickenham. The next largest ethnic groups in all four wards were Other White, White Irish and Indian.

Geography
Twickenham is bounded by the River Thames on the south and the land is relatively flat though it does rise gently to the west as it approaches Whitton. The land is fertile and was home to numerous market gardens before housing became the predominant land use with the coming on the railways in the mid nineteenth century.

The town is bordered on the south-eastern side by the River Thames and Eel Pie Island – which is connected to the Twickenham embankment by a narrow footbridge, the first of which was erected in 1957. Before this, access was by means of a hand-operated ferry that was hauled across using a chain on the riverbed. The land adjacent to the river, from Strawberry Hill in the south to Marble Hill Park in the north, is occupied by a mixture of luxury dwellings, formal gardens, public houses and a newly built park and leisure facility.

In the south, in Strawberry Hill, lies St Mary's University, Twickenham historically specialising in sports studies, teacher training, religious studies, the humanities, drama studies and English literature. Strawberry Hill was originally a small cottage in two or three acres (8,000 or 12,000 m2) of land by the River Thames. Horace Walpole, a son of the politician Robert Walpole, rented the cottage in 1747 and subsequently bought it and turned it into one of the incunabula of the Gothic revival. The university shares part of its campus with Walpole's Strawberry Hill. On adjacent land were the villa and garden of the poet Alexander Pope. The villa was demolished in 1808/09 following the orders of Lady Howe, who became irritated with the large number of tourists who visited the place. The grotto which formed the basement survived. A memorial plaque was placed on the site in remembrance in 1848.

A road just north of the campus is named Pope's Grove, and a local landmark next to the main road is the Alexander Pope Hotel (previously known as Pope's Grotto), a public house and hotel where Pope's landmark informal garden used to be. Near this hostelry lie St Catherine's school for girls and Radnor House School, in a building on the site of Pope's white stucco villa and the location of Pope's original – surviving – grotto.

There are a large number of fine houses in the area, many of them Victorian. The open space known as Radnor Gardens lies opposite Pope's Grotto.

Not far from Pope's Grotto is the Roman Catholic Church of Saint James, which has a memorial window in the form of the Royal Arms of Portugal and memorials to Manuel II, Portugal's last king, who worshipped here and died in nearby Fulwell Park in 1932.

Twickenham proper begins in the vicinity of Pope's Grotto, with generally large period houses to the west, the traditional definition of which is Twickenham Green, and similar housing in the east all the distance to Richmond Bridge typically largest near the Thames. The town centre is not actually in the centre of the town, rather in the south-eastern corner, as Twickenham was built up moving away from the Thames. Whitton lies further to the north and west.

The districts of East Twickenham and St Margarets lie to the north-east of central Twickenham on the west side of Richmond Bridge, the shortest bridge on the Tideway. These are popular for their attractive tree-lined residential roads and an eclectic range of shops and cafés. St Margarets is the location of Twickenham Studios, one of Greater London's major film studios.

East Twickenham abuts the River Thames at Richmond Bridge and St Margarets has its river frontage immediately to the north. The great estate of Cambridge Park, home of Richard Owen Cambridge, the 18th-century satirical poet, was located here.

Nearest places

 * Fulwell
 * Ham
 * Hampton
 * Hampton Hill
 * Hampton Wick
 * Hounslow
 * Isleworth
 * Kingston upon Thames
 * Richmond
 * St Margarets
 * Teddington
 * Whitton

Education

Twickenham has a university and several schools in Twickenham including secondary schools, primary schools and kindergartens. Many of these are easily accessible by the local bus network mentioned in the Transport section.

Richmond upon Thames College, a college of further and higher education, is on Egerton Road in Twickenham.

St Mary's University, Twickenham has been located in Twickenham since moving from Hammersmith in 1925.

Transport
Until 1971 London Transport operated a bus depot known as Twickenham garage (coded AB) on Cambridge Road, East Twickenham. The relevant destination blind for garage journeys always referred to this location as Richmond Bridge, which was close by. On closure, all its routes and vehicles were transferred to Fulwell bus garage, but the building remained under the ownership of London Transport until the mid-1990s when it was demolished to make way for a housing development.

Fulwell garage was originally the base for London United Tramways in south Middlesex. The trams were replaced by trolleybuses that started operating from Fulwell garage in the 1930s. The trolleybuses were later replaced by AEC Routemaster buses and Middlesex's last trolleybus terminated here on the night of 8 May 1962, following a commemorative circuit of the Fulwell routes by Middlesex's first trolleybus, No.1 of the A1 class Felthams, known as "Diddlers". This vehicle is preserved in working order.

Originally Twickenham railway station was situated on the western side of the A310 London Road bridge before the new station was opened on the eastern side. This accounts for roads named Railway Approach and Station Road, which now give no access to the station.

Nearest railway stations
The main railway station in the town is Twickenham itself, although St Margarets, Whitton, Fulwell and Strawberry Hill stations are also within the Twickenham post town. Stations in nearby towns (all, except for Richmond and Isleworth, once part of the former Borough of Twickenham) are:

 * Hampton railway station
 * Hampton Wick railway station
 * Isleworth railway station
 * Richmond station
 * Teddington railway station

Buses
London Buses serving Twickenham are:

All above routes serve King Street in the town centre apart from the 110 and the 481. The 481 runs through western Twickenham and the 110 runs through northern Twickenham. The N22 and the N33 only operate at night (00:00–05:00).

Sport
Twickenham is home to the headquarters of the Rugby Football Union and Twickenham Stadium. The England national rugby union team play all their home matches at Twickenham Stadium, which is one of England's largest sports stadiums and the world's largest rugby stadium. Harlequins, a rugby union club, play at the Twickenham Stoop.

Twickenham Stadium hosted Rugby World Cup fixtures in 1991, 1999 and 2015, including semi-final matches in 1999 and the final matches in 1991 and 2015.

Arts and culture
The Exchange is a community building, including a 320-seat theatre, opposite Twickenham railway station. It opened in October 2017. The building is owned by Richmond upon Thames Council and is managed by St Mary's University, Twickenham.

The Twickenham Museum is a volunteer-run museum opposite St Mary's parish church. It is open every day except Mondays.

The Cabbage Patch pub on London Road has, since 1983, been a regular venue for live music on Sunday nights, organised by TwickFolk.

Public art
In 2015, working in partnership with Richmond upon Thames Council and the architectural design practice Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, Twickenham resident Graham Henderson conceived, designed, built and installed Pope's Urn, an important contemporary piece of public art, inspired by the poetry of Alexander Pope. Enjoying a central position on the Twickenham riverside, the sculpture was commissioned to celebrate the 2015 Rugby World Cup, and was opened in a ceremony in September 2015.

Living people

 * Steve Allen, radio presenter, lives in Twickenham.
 * Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister, lived in a house in Twickenham in 1972, which he rented from a member of the Vineyard Church in Richmond, and used the Vineyard's crypt every Sunday for promotional events.
 * Jason Bradbury, children's writer and TV presenter, lives in Twickenham.
 * Rob Brydon, comedian, lives in Strawberry Hill.
 * Michael Fish, television and radio weather forecaster, lives in Twickenham.
 * Oliver Golding, former child actor and current LTA junior tennis player, has lived in Twickenham.
 * Keeley Hawes, actress, and Matthew Macfadyen, actor, live in Twickenham.
 * Graham Henderson, arts consultant and Chief Executive of the Rimbaud and Verlaine Foundation, lives in Twickenham.
 * Roxanna Panufnik, composer and musician, was brought up in the Panufnik family home at Riverside House in Twickenham overlooking the Thames.
 * Tim Rowett, renowned toy collector and YouTube personality, lives in Twickenham.
 * Pete Townshend, guitarist for The Who, who lives at The Wick on Richmond Hill, previously lived at Chapel House, Twickenham, now called 15 Montpelier Row.

Historical figures

 * Brothers Arthur Anderson (1886–1967) and Gerard Anderson (1889–1914) were born in Twickenham and competed in track and field events in the 1912 Summer Olympics. Gerard was also the world record holder in the 440 metres hurdles. Gerard served as a second lieutenant in the Cheshire Regiment in the First World War. He was mentioned in despatches and was killed in combat in 1914.
 * Trevor Baylis (1937–2018), inventor of the clockwork radio, lived, worked and died on Eel Pie Island, Twickenham.
 * Richard Owen Cambridge (1717–1802), poet, lived at Cambridge House, Twickenham.
 * Kitty Clive (1711–1785), actress, who retired in 1769 to a villa in Twickenham that had been a gift from her friend Horace Walpole, dying there in 1785. She was buried at St Mary's. At the northeast corner of the church, there is a memorial to her on which a poem praises her generosity.
 * Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), poet, lived at South End House in Montpelier Row from 1940 until his death.
 * Henry Du Pre Labouchere (1831–1912), Liberal MP and journalist, lived at Pope's Villa, Cross Deep, Twickenham. The site is marked by a blue plaque.
 * Katie Edith Gliddon (1883–1967), watercolour artist and militant suffragette, was born in Twickenham.
 * William Goode (1907–1986), a colonial administrator and 1st Yang di-Pertuan Negara of Singapore, was born in Twickenham in 1907.
 * Ron Greenwood (1921–2006), manager of West Ham United F.C. and the England national football team, lived in Twickenham early in his career.
 * Harry Hampton (1870–1922) British Army sergeant who was the Victoria Cross, was born in Crown Terrace, Richmond and died in Twickenham. He is buried in Richmond Old Cemetery.
 * The Hon. Nellie Ionides (1883–1962) lived at Riverside House, Twickenham. A collector, connoisseur and philanthropist, she is best known for saving the 18th-century Octagon Room at Orleans House in Twickenham from destruction, and for donating this and also many pieces from her extensive art collection to the local council (now the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames).
 * Norman Cyril Jackson (1919–1994), Royal Air Force (RAF) sergeant who earned the Victoria Cross, died in Hampton Hill and is buried in Twickenham Cemetery.
 * Harriet Kendall (1857–1933), elocutionist, singer, pianist, poet and composer of ballads, lived at Elsinore, 8 Park Road, East Twickenham.
 * Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1st Baronet (1646–1723), portrait painter, who lived in Whitton, was a churchwarden at St Mary's, Twickenham when its 14th-century nave collapsed in 1713 and he was active in the plans for the church's reconstruction by John James. Kneller's remains were interred in the church.
 * Batty Langley (1696–1751), garden designer, was the son of a jobbing gardener in Twickenham and was baptised there.
 * Charles Lightoller (1874–1952), the most senior officer to survive the Titanic sinking; in retirement from 1947 until his death in 1952, he lived at and managed Richmond Slipways in East Twickenham (No. 1, Duck's Walk), which built and maintained motor launches for the river police.
 * The future Louis Philippe I, Duc d’Orleans, who was King of the French from 1830 to 1848, went into exile in 1793 and, before his return to France in 1815 on the fall of Napoleon, lived mostly in Twickenham. He and his two younger brothers lived in relative poverty from 1800 to 1807 at Highshot House, Crown Road; the house was demolished in 1927. From 1815 to 1817 Louis Philippe leased a house on the Twickenham riverside and gave it the name Orleans House. The house was demolished in 1926 but the octagon and some outbuildings survived and are now the Orleans House Gallery. After the 1848 revolution, many members of Louis Philippe's large family were forced into exile and took residences in the Richmond area.
 * King Manuel II of Portugal (1874–1952) lived in exile at Fulwell Park, Twickenham, following the 5 October 1910 revolution in Portugal.  He died in the house in 1932.
 * Andrzej Panufnik (1914–1991), Polish-born composer, lived and died in a house on Twickenham Riverside.
 * Alexander Pope (1688–1744), poet, lived in Twickenham. Pope was known as the Bard of Twickenham, or sometimes, on account of his acerbity, the Wasp of Twickenham. He lies in St Mary's, Twickenham under a stone slab engraved simply with the letter P, near a bronze memorial plate.
 * Peter Sallis (1921–2017), actor, was born in Twickenham. He was the voice of Wallace in the Wallace and Gromit films.
 * James Saunders (1925–2004), playwright, lived in East Twickenham.
 * Sir Ratan Tata (1871–1918), a Parsee and a major industrialist in India, who bought York House, Twickenham in 1906 and lived there until 1914, when he returned to India. His widow Navajbai decided to sell the house and its contents in 1924.
 * Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), author and poet, lived at Chapel House, now 15 Montpelier Row from 1851 until 1853. His son Hallam Tennyson (1852–1928), second Governor-General of Australia, was born there and was christened at St Mary's, Twickenham in 1852.
 * J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), artist, designed and commissioned the building of Solus Lodge in Sandycoombe Road, on the border of East Twickenham and St Margarets. The house survives as Sandycombe Lodge. The site is marked by a blue plaque.
 * Thomas Twining (1675–1741) was a merchant, and the founder of the tea company Twinings. In about 1722 he bought a property later known as Dial House, next door to the church of St Mary's, Twickenham, where he either rebuilt, or converted and extended, the buildings already there. The sundial on the façade carries the date 1726, possibly the time when the new building was finished. After Twining died in 1741, he was buried at St Mary's, where there is a memorial to him at the north-east corner of the church.
 * Horace Walpole (1717–1797), art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and politician, built and lived at Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham.
 * Paul Whitehead (1710–1774), poet and satirist, secretary to the infamous Hellfire Club, lived at Colne Lodge, Twickenham from about 1755.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Twickenham


text:
Upminster

Upminster is a suburban town in East London, England, within the London Borough of Havering. Located 16.5 mi east-northeast of Charing Cross, it is one of the locally important district centres identified in the London Plan.

Historically a rural village, it formed an ancient parish in the Chafford hundred of the county of Essex. The economic history of Upminster is characterised by a shift from farming to brick making to garden suburb. It is currently mainly commercial shopping, small businesses and residential.

It was first connected to central London by rail in 1885 and has a terminal station on the London Underground network. As part of the suburban growth of London in the 20th century, Upminster significantly expanded and increased in population, becoming part of Hornchurch Urban District in 1934, and has formed part of Greater London since 1965.

Toponymy
The placename Upminster is first recorded in 1062 as Upmynstre and is recorded in the 1086 Domesday Book as Upmunstra. It is formed from Old English upp and mynster, meaning 'the large church on high ground'. The high ground of St Laurence's parish church being in relation to the valley of the River Ingrebourne and the Upminster Bridge over the river shares the name. An alternative explanation suggests the upp could refer to the geographical relationship to a church at Barking or Tilbury in Anglo-Saxon times.

Economic development
There was a Roman farmstead in the Upminster area from the 1st century to the 3rd century, and agriculture was the predominant industry throughout the following centuries.

The area was once wooded, but clearances in the 12th century gave more land over to arable farming; and by the 17th century there were a variety of crops and livestock. There was a growth in market gardening in the 19th century. There have been a number of windmills in Upminster and one of which, a smock mill built in 1803, remains. Local industry included a tannery, gravel extraction and a brick works that was connected to the railway station by a tramway in 1895.

The London, Tilbury and Southend Railway from Fenchurch Street was extended from Barking to Upminster in 1885. The underground Whitechapel and Bow Railway opened in 1902 and allowed through services of the District Railway to operate to Upminster. The District converted to electric trains in 1905 and services were cut back to East Ham. Delayed by World War I, electrified tracks were extended by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway to Upminster and through services resumed in 1932.

Local government
Upminster formed an ancient parish of 3369 acres in the Chafford hundred of Essex. The parish vestry had meetings in the church until 1798, when they moved to the Bell Inn. The parish was divided into North and South wards by the Hornchurch to Cranham road. In 1836 the vestry lost control of poor relief, with Upminster becoming part of the Romford Poor Law Union and in 1875 the parish became part of Romford rural sanitary district. Following the Local Government Act 1894, the sanitary district became Romford Rural District and a parish council was formed of nine members, increasing to twelve by 1913 as the population had doubled. The parish council acquired the Clock House building on St Mary's Lane for use as offices in 1924. The parish formed part of the London Traffic Area from 1924 and the London Passenger Transport Area from 1933. In 1934 the parish council was abolished and Upminster was combined with other parishes to form part of Hornchurch Urban District. In 1965 the urban district was abolished and its former area was combined with that of Municipal Borough of Romford; and since then has formed part of the London Borough of Havering in Greater London. For elections to the Greater London Council, Upminster was part of the Havering electoral division until 1973 and then the Upminster electoral division until 1986.

Urban development
The parish had three early centres of activity; the village around the church and the settlements of Hacton and Corbets Tey. The estates of Gaynes, New Place and Upminster Hall were purchased during the 17th century by merchants in the City of London. This caused a significant number of buildings in the town to be constructed or improved. Upkeep of the three bridges crossing the Ingrebourne were the responsibility of Upminster, as the adjacent Hornchurch parish was in the Havering liberty and was exempt from responsibility because of its charter. Although the opening of the station was key to the development of the suburb, land was not purchased for development until 10 acre were secured in 1901.

Electricity was introduced in Upminster in 1926. Gas main supply came from Romford in 1872 and from 1905 there was gas street lighting. The area was served by good spring water, with mains supply provided by the South Essex Waterworks Company from 1836. Works on the sewerage system began in 1899 in Upminster village and Corbets Tey. In 1922 sewage works for Upminster and Cranham were opened in Great Warley. Land for Upminster Park was purchased by the parish council in 1929.

Governance
The town forms part of the Hornchurch and Upminster UK Parliament constituency, and is covered by the Havering wards of Upminster and Cranham. The current MP is Julia Lopez. Each ward elects three councillors to Havering London Borough Council. All six councillors elected in 2010 for the two wards were the Upminster and Cranham Residents' Association candidates and the area is unusual in that the residents' association is strongly active. From 1945 to 1974 Upminster formed part of the Hornchurch constituency and from 1974 to 2010 it formed part of the Upminster constituency. Upminster is within the Havering and Redbridge London Assembly constituency.

Geography
Upminster rises to about 200 ft above sea level to the north and is about 50 ft above sea level to the south. It rests on a layer of loam, above sand and gravel in the south and London Clay to the north. It is bounded in the west by the River Ingrebourne and there is a stream running east–west, just north of Corbets Tey that has been dammed to form a lake. It has formed part of the continuously built-up area of London since the 1930s and is contiguous with Cranham to the east and Hornchurch to the west. To the north and south there is open land that forms part of the Metropolitan Green Belt and there are open spaces formed by Upminster Golf Club and Upminster Hall Playing Field to the north, Upminster Park and Clock House Gardens to the south, and the Ingrebourne Valley linear park to the south west. The town is effectively divided into north and south parts by the railway line. The north is predominantly residential, with the southern part containing the main shopping area. Further south it becomes predominantly residential again. Upminster is a post town in the RM postcode area; it forms a long protrusion over the M25 motorway and additionally includes North Ockendon, also in Havering, and Bulphan in Thurrock.

Demography
The Havering committee area for Upminster is defined as the wards of Upminster and Cranham. Demographic data is produced by the Office for National Statistics for these wards. All of Upminster is contained within these wards, however they also cover the connected settlement of Cranham and the rural outlier of North Ockendon. In 2001 the population of Upminster ward was 12,674 and Cranham ward was 12,242, giving a total population of 25,098. 80.95% in Upminster and 81.73% in Cranham report their religion as Christian, compared to 76.13% for Havering, 58.23% in London and 71.74% in England. 10.08% in Upminster and 10.46% in Cranham report having no religion, compared to 13.18% in Havering, 15.76% in London and 14.59% in England. With a black and minority ethnic population of 3% in 2001, Cranham and Upminster wards have the lowest Simpson index for ethnic diversity in London. The level of home ownership is atypically high compared to the rest of London and England, with over 90% of housing tenure under owner-occupation in both wards. The Upminster ward has one of the lowest levels of deprivation in London.

The 2011 census showed that the population was 96% white (92% British, 2% Other, 2% Irish). Indian, Chinese and Black African were 1% each. 75% of the population is Christian, the highest recorded in London.

Economy
Upminster is identified in the London Plan as a local district centre with 37000 sqm of commercial floorspace. It is not considered a significant commercial office location. Within Havering, it is identified as one of seven town centres in the borough, with a retail area extending along Station Road, St Mary's Lane and Corbets Tey Road. The unit sizes are mostly small with the largest outlets the Roomes Fashion and Home department store, the Roomes Furniture and Interiors furniture store, and the Aldi, M&S Simply Food and Waitrose supermarkets.

Transport
The town is served by Upminster railway station on the London, Tilbury & Southend line and the London Underground, in London fare zone 6. The western part of the town is also served by Upminster Bridge tube station. Upminster and Upminster Bridge are on the District line of the London Underground, with services to Richmond, Ealing Broadway and Wimbledon via central London. The station at Upminster is served by c2c who operate services to Fenchurch Street and Shoeburyness. London Overground operate services to Romford via Emerson Park. There are Transport for London bus services to Hornchurch, Romford, North Ockendon, Lakeside Shopping Centre and Cranham. To the south of Upminster is Damyns Hall Aerodrome. The A127 road to the north is the main radial artery to central London, with the A124 road terminating in the town. The M25 motorway is located about 1.5 mi to the east of the town centre.

Culture
Havering Council's urban strategy recognises that nearby Hornchurch is the main cultural hub of the borough with a large theatre and arts spaces, and Romford offers the largest regional concentration of entertainment facilities. Within Upminster is New Windmill Hall, a flexible entertainment space, built in 1968, which holds up to 300 people. Upminster forms part of the tourism strategy for the borough. It is the location of Upminster Windmill, one of the few remaining mills in Greater London and is Grade II* listed. There is also the Tithe Barn Museum, containing artifacts of domestic and agricultural use. In the west of Upminster is Hornchurch Stadium, which is the home ground of A.F.C. Hornchurch. Upminster is often associated with Ian Dury and his 1981 album Lord Upminster is named after the town.

Speed of sound
The speed of sound was first accurately calculated by the Reverend William Derham, Rector of Upminster, thus improving on Sir Isaac Newton's estimates. Derham used a telescope from the tower of the church of St Laurence, Upminster to observe the flash of a distant shotgun being fired, and then measured the time until he heard the gunshot with a half-second pendulum. Measurements were made of gunshots from a number of local landmarks, including the Church of St Mary Magdalene, North Ockendon. The distance was known by triangulation, and thus the speed that the sound had travelled could be calculated.

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William Walton

Sir William Turner Walton (29 March 1902 – 8 March 1983) was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include Façade, the cantata Belshazzar's Feast, the Viola Concerto, the First Symphony, and the British coronation marches Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre.

Born in Oldham, Lancashire, the son of a musician, Walton was a chorister and then an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. On leaving the university, he was taken up by the literary Sitwell siblings, who provided him with a home and a cultural education. His earliest work of note was a collaboration with Edith Sitwell, Façade, which at first brought him notoriety as a modernist, but later became a popular ballet score.

In middle age, Walton left England and set up home with his young wife Susana on the Italian island of Ischia. By this time, he had ceased to be regarded as a modernist, and some of his compositions of the 1950s were criticised as old-fashioned. His only full-length opera, Troilus and Cressida, was among the works to be so labelled and has made little impact in opera houses. In his last years, his works came back into critical fashion; his later compositions, dismissed by critics at the time of their premieres, were revalued and regarded alongside his earlier works.

Walton was a slow worker, painstakingly perfectionist, and his complete body of work across his long career is not large. His most popular compositions continue to be frequently performed in the 21st century, and by 2010 almost all his works had been released on CD.

Early years
Walton was born into a musical family in Oldham, Lancashire, the second son in a family of three boys and a girl. His father, Charles Alexander Walton, was a musician who had trained at the Royal Manchester College of Music under Charles Hallé, and made a living as a singing teacher and church organist. Charles's wife, Louisa Maria (née Turner), had been a singer before their marriage. William Walton's musical talents were spotted when he was still a young boy, and he took piano and violin lessons, though he never mastered either instrument. He was more successful as a singer: he and his elder brother sang in their father's choir, taking part in performances of large-scale works by Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn and others.

Walton was sent to a local school, but in 1912 his father saw a newspaper advertisement for probationer choristers at Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford and applied for William to be admitted. The boy and his mother missed their intended train from Manchester to Oxford because Walton's father had spent the money for the fare in a local public house. Louisa Walton had to borrow the fares from a greengrocer. Although they arrived in Oxford after the entrance trials were over, Mrs Walton successfully pleaded for her son to be heard, and he was accepted.

He remained at the choir school for the next six years. The Dean of Christ Church, Dr Thomas Strong, noted the young Walton's musical potential and was encouraged in this view by Sir Hubert Parry, who saw the manuscripts of some of Walton's early compositions and said to Strong, "There's a lot in this chap; you must keep your eye on him."

At the age of sixteen Walton became an undergraduate of Christ Church. It is sometimes said that he was Oxford's youngest undergraduate since Henry VIII, and though this is probably not correct, he was nonetheless among the youngest. He came under the influence of Hugh Allen, the dominant figure in Oxford's musical life. Allen introduced Walton to modern music, including Stravinsky's Petrushka, and enthused him with "the mysteries of the orchestra". Walton spent much time in the university library, studying scores by Stravinsky, Debussy, Sibelius, Roussel and others. He neglected his non-musical studies, and though he passed the musical examinations with ease, he failed the Greek and algebra examinations required for graduation.

Little survives from Walton's juvenilia, but the choral anthem A Litany, written when he was fifteen, anticipates his mature style.

At Oxford Walton befriended several poets including Roy Campbell, Siegfried Sassoon and, most importantly for his future, Sacheverell Sitwell. Walton was sent down from Oxford in 1920 without a degree or any firm plans. Sitwell invited him to lodge in London with him and his literary brother and sister, Osbert and Edith. Walton took up residence in the attic of their house in Chelsea, later recalling, "I went for a few weeks and stayed about fifteen years".

First successes
The Sitwells looked after their protégé both materially and culturally, giving him not only a home but a stimulating cultural education. He took music lessons with Ernest Ansermet, Ferruccio Busoni and Edward J. Dent. He attended the Russian ballet, met Stravinsky and Gershwin, heard the Savoy Orpheans at the Savoy Hotel and wrote an experimental string quartet heavily influenced by the Second Viennese School that was performed at a festival of new music at Salzburg in 1923. Alban Berg heard the performance and was impressed enough to take Walton to meet Arnold Schoenberg, Berg's teacher and the founder of the Second Viennese School.

In 1923, in collaboration with Edith Sitwell, Walton had his first great success, though at first it was a succès de scandale. Façade was first performed in public at the Aeolian Hall, London, on 12 June. The work consisted of Edith's verses, which she recited through a megaphone from behind a screen, while Walton conducted an ensemble of six players in his accompanying music. The press was generally condemnatory. Walton's biographer Michael Kennedy cites as typical a contemporary headline: "Drivel That They Paid to Hear". The Daily Express loathed the work, but admitted that it was naggingly memorable. The Manchester Guardian wrote of "relentless cacophony". The Observer condemned the verses and dismissed Walton's music as "harmless". In The Illustrated London News, Dent was much more appreciative: "The audience was at first inclined to treat the whole thing as an absurd joke, but there is always a surprisingly serious element in Miss Sitwell's poetry and Mr Walton's music ... which soon induced the audience to listen with breathless attention." In The Sunday Times, Ernest Newman said of Walton, "as a musical joker he is a jewel of the first water ... Here is obviously a humorous musical talent of the first order.

Among the audience were Evelyn Waugh, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and Noël Coward. The last was so outraged by the avant-garde nature of Sitwell's verses and the staging, that he marched out ostentatiously during the performance. The players did not like the music: the clarinettist, Charles Draper asked the composer, "Mr Walton, has a clarinet player ever done you an injury?" Nevertheless, the work soon became accepted, and within a decade Walton's music was used for the popular Façade ballet, choreographed by Frederick Ashton.

Walton's works of the 1920s, while he was living in the Sitwells' attic, include the overture Portsmouth Point, dedicated to Sassoon and inspired by the well-known painting of the same name by Thomas Rowlandson. It was first heard as an entr'acte at a performance in Diaghilev's 1926 ballet season, where The Times complained, "It is a little difficult to make much of new music when it is heard through the hum of conversation." Sir Henry Wood programmed the work at the Proms the following year, where it made more of an impression. The composer conducted this performance; he did not enjoy conducting, but he had firm views on how his works should be interpreted, and orchestral players appreciated his "easy nonchalance" and "complete absence of fuss." Walton's other works of the 1920s included a short orchestral piece, Siesta (1926) and a Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra (1928), which was well-received at its premiere at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert, but has not entered the regular repertory.

The Viola Concerto (1929) brought Walton to the forefront of British classical music. It was written at the suggestion of Sir Thomas Beecham for the viola virtuoso Lionel Tertis. When Tertis received the manuscript, he rejected it immediately. The composer and violist Paul Hindemith stepped into the breach and gave the first performance. The work was greeted with enthusiasm. In The Manchester Guardian, Eric Blom wrote, "This young composer is a born genius" and said that it was tempting to call the concerto the best thing in recent music of any nationality. Tertis soon changed his mind and took the work up. A performance by him at a Three Choirs Festival concert in Worcester in 1932 was the only occasion on which Walton met Elgar, whom he greatly admired. Elgar did not share the general enthusiasm for Walton's concerto.

Walton's next major composition was the massive choral cantata Belshazzar's Feast (1931). It began as a work on a modest scale; the BBC commissioned a piece for a small chorus, orchestra of no more than fifteen players, and soloist. Osbert Sitwell constructed a text, selecting verses from several books of the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation. As Walton worked on it, he found that his music required far larger forces than the BBC proposed to allow, and Beecham rescued him by programming the work for the 1931 Leeds Festival, to be conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Walton later recalled Beecham as saying, "As you'll never hear the work again, my boy, why not throw in a couple of brass bands?" During early rehearsals, the Leeds chorus members found Walton's music difficult to master, and it was falsely rumoured in London musical circles that Beecham had been obliged to send Sargent to Leeds to quell a revolt. The first performance was a triumph for the composer, conductor and performers. A contemporary critic wrote, "Those who experienced the tremendous impact of its first performance had full justification for feeling that a great composer had arisen in our land, a composer to whose potentialities it was impossible to set any limits." The work has remained a staple of the choral repertoire.

1930s
In the 1930s, Walton's relationship with the Sitwells became less close. He had love affairs and new friendships that drew him out of their orbit. His first long affair was with Imma von Doernberg, the young widow of a German baron. She and Walton met in the late 1920s and they were together until 1934, when she left him. Walton's later affair with Alice, Viscountess Wimborne (born 1880), which lasted from 1934 until her death in April 1948, caused a wider breach between Walton and the Sitwells, as she disliked them as much as they disliked her. By the 1930s, Walton was earning enough from composing to allow him financial independence for the first time. A legacy from a musical benefactress in 1931 further enhanced his finances, and in 1934 he left the Sitwells' house and bought a house in Belgravia.

Walton's first major composition after Belshazzar's Feast was his First Symphony. It was not written to a commission, and Walton worked slowly on the score from late 1931 until he completed it in 1935. He had composed the first three of the four movements by the end of 1933 and promised the premiere to the conductor Hamilton Harty. Walton then found himself unable to complete the work. The end of his affair with Imma von Doernberg coincided with, and may have contributed to, a sudden and persistent writer's block. Harty persuaded Walton to let him perform the three existing movements, which he premiered in December 1934 with the London Symphony Orchestra. During 1934 Walton interrupted work on the symphony to compose his first film music, for Paul Czinner's Escape Me Never (1934), for which he was paid £300.

After a break of eight months, Walton resumed work on the symphony and completed it in 1935. Harty and the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave the premiere of the completed piece in November of that year. The symphony aroused international interest. The leading continental conductors Wilhelm Furtwängler and Willem Mengelberg sent for copies of the score, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered the work in the US under Harty, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the New York premiere, and the young George Szell conducted the symphony in Australia.

Elgar having died in 1934, the authorities turned to Walton to compose a march in the Elgarian tradition for the coronation of George VI in 1937. His Crown Imperial was an immediate success with the public, but disappointed those of Walton's admirers who thought of him as an avant-garde composer. Among Walton's other works from this decade are more film scores, including the first of his incidental music for Shakespeare adaptations, As You Like It (1936); a short ballet for a West End revue (1936); and a choral piece, In Honour of the City of London (1937). His most important work of the 1930s, alongside the symphony, was the Violin Concerto (1939), commissioned by Jascha Heifetz. The concerto, Walton later revealed, expressed his love for Alice Wimborne. Its strong romantic style caused some critics to label it retrogressive, and Walton said in a newspaper interview, "Today's white hope is tomorrow's black sheep. These days it is very sad for a composer to grow old ... I seriously advise all sensitive composers to die at the age of 37. I know: I've gone through the first halcyon period and am just about ripe for my critical damnation."

In the late 1930s Walton became aware of a younger English composer whose fame was shortly to overtake his, Benjamin Britten. After their first meeting, Britten wrote in his diary, "[...] to lunch with William Walton at Sloane Square. He is charming, but I feel always the school relationship with him – he is so obviously the head prefect of English music, whereas I'm the promising new boy." They remained on friendly terms for the rest of Britten's life; Walton admired many of Britten's works, and considered him a genius; Britten did not admire all of Walton's works but was grateful for his support at difficult times in his life.

Second World War
During the Second World War Walton was exempted from military service on the understanding that he would compose music for wartime propaganda films. In addition to driving ambulances (extremely badly, he said), he was attached to the Army Film Unit as music adviser. He wrote scores for six films during the war – some that he thought "rather boring" and some that have become classics such as The First of the Few (1942) and Laurence Olivier's adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry V (1944).

Walton was at first dismissive of his film scores, regarding them as professional but of no intrinsic worth; he resisted attempts to arrange them into concert suites, saying, "Film music is not good film music if it can be used for any other purpose." He later relented to the extent of allowing concert suites to be arranged from The First of the Few and the Olivier Shakespeare films. For the BBC, Walton composed the music for a large-scale radio drama about Christopher Columbus, written by Louis MacNeice and starring Olivier. As with his film music, the composer was inclined to dismiss the musical importance of his work on the programme.

Apart from these commissions, Walton's wartime works of any magnitude comprised incidental music for John Gielgud's 1942 production of Macbeth; two scores for the Sadler's Wells Ballet, The Wise Virgins, based on the music of J. S. Bach transcribed by Walton, and The Quest, with a plot loosely based on Spenser's The Faerie Queene; and, for the concert hall, a suite of orchestral miniatures, Music for Children, and a comedy overture, Scapino, composed for the fiftieth anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Walton's house in London was destroyed by German bombing in May 1941, after which he spent much of his time at Alice Wimborne's family house at Ashby St Ledgers in the countryside of Northamptonshire in the middle of England. While there, Walton worked on projects that had been in his mind for some time. In 1939 he had been planning a substantial chamber work, a string quartet, but he set it aside while composing his wartime film scores. In early 1945 he turned again to the quartet. Walton was conscious that Britten, with Les Illuminations (1940), the Sinfonia da Requiem (1942), and Peter Grimes in 1945, had produced a series of substantial works, while Walton had produced no major composition since the Violin Concerto in 1939. Among English critics and audiences, the Violin Concerto was not at first rated one of Walton's finest works. Because Heifetz had bought the exclusive rights to play the concerto for two years, it was not heard in Britain until 1941. The London premiere, with a less famous soloist, and in the unflattering acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall, did not immediately reveal the work as a masterpiece. The String Quartet in A minor, premiered in May 1947, was Walton's most substantial work of the 1940s. Kennedy calls it one of his finest achievements and "a sure sign that he had thrown off the trammels of his cinema style and rediscovered his true voice."

Postwar
In 1947, Walton was presented with the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal. In the same year he accepted an invitation from the BBC to compose his first opera. He decided to base it on Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, but his preliminary work came to a halt in April 1948 when Alice Wimborne died. To take Walton's mind off his grief, the music publisher Leslie Boosey persuaded him to be a British delegate to a conference on copyright in Buenos Aires later that year. While there, Walton met Susana Gil Passo (1926–2010), daughter of an Argentine lawyer. At 22 she was 24 years younger than Walton (Alice Wimborne had been 22 years his senior), and at first she ridiculed his romantic interest in her. He persisted, and she eventually accepted his proposal of marriage. The wedding was held in Buenos Aires in December 1948. From the start of their marriage, the couple spent half the year on the Italian island of Ischia, and by the mid-1950s they lived there permanently.

Walton's last work of the 1940s was his music for Olivier's film of Hamlet (1948). After that, he focused his attentions on his opera Troilus and Cressida. On the advice of the BBC, he invited Christopher Hassall to write the libretto. This did not help Walton's relations with the Sitwells, each of whom thought he or she should have been asked to be his librettist. Work continued slowly over the next few years, with many breaks while Walton turned to other things. In 1950 he and Heifetz recorded the Violin Concerto for EMI. In 1951 Walton was knighted. In the same year, he prepared an authorised version of Façade, which had undergone many revisions since its premiere. In 1953, following the accession of Elizabeth II he was again called on to write a coronation march, Orb and Sceptre; he was also commissioned to write a choral setting of the Te Deum for the occasion.

Troilus and Cressida was presented at Covent Garden on 3 December 1954. Its preparation was dogged by misfortunes. Olivier, originally scheduled to direct it, backed out, as did Henry Moore who had agreed to design the production; Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, for whom the role of Cressida had been written, refused to perform it; her replacement, Magda László, had difficulty mastering the English words; and Sargent, the conductor, "did not seem well acquainted with the score". The premiere had a friendly reception, but there was a general feeling that Hassall and Walton had written an old-fashioned opera in an outmoded tradition. The piece was subsequently staged in San Francisco, New York and Milan during the next year, but failed to make a positive impression, and did not enter the regular operatic repertory.

In 1956 Walton sold his London house and took up full-time residence on Ischia. He built a hilltop house at Forio and called it La Mortella. Susana Walton created a magnificent garden there. Walton's other works of the 1950s include the music for a fourth Shakespeare film, Olivier's Richard III, and the Cello Concerto (1956), written for Gregor Piatigorsky, who gave the premiere in January 1957 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the conductor Charles Munch. Some critics felt that the concerto was old-fashioned; Peter Heyworth wrote that there was little in the work that would have startled an audience in the year the RMS Titanic met its iceberg (1912). It has nevertheless entered the regular repertoire, performed by Paul Tortelier, Yo-Yo Ma, Lynn Harrell and Pierre Fournier among others.

In 1966 Walton successfully underwent surgery for lung cancer. Until then he had been an inveterate pipe-smoker, but after the operation he never smoked again. While he was convalescing, he worked on a one-act comic opera, The Bear, which was premiered at Britten's Aldeburgh Festival, in June 1966, and enthusiastically received. Walton had become so used to being written off by music critics that he felt "there must be something wrong when the worms turned on some praise." Walton received the Order of Merit in 1967, the fourth composer to be so honoured, after Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten.

Walton's orchestral works of the 1960s include his Second Symphony (1960), Variations on a Theme by Hindemith (1963), Capriccio burlesco (1968), and Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten (1969). His song cycles from this period were composed for Peter Pears (Anon in Love, 1960) and Schwarzkopf (A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table, 1962). He was commissioned to compose a score for the 1969 film Battle of Britain, but the film company rejected most of his score, replacing it with music by Ron Goodwin. A concert suite of Walton's score was published and recorded after Walton's death. After his experience over Battle of Britain, Walton declared that he would write no more film music, but he was persuaded by Olivier to compose the score for a film of Chekhov's Three Sisters in 1969.

Last years
Walton was never a facile or quick composer, and in his final decade, he found composition increasingly difficult. He repeatedly tried to compose a third symphony for André Previn, but eventually abandoned it. Many of his final works are re-orchestrations or revisions of earlier music. He orchestrated his song cycle Anon in Love (originally for tenor and guitar), and at the request of Neville Marriner adapted his A minor String Quartet as a Sonata for Strings. One original work from this period was his Jubilate Deo, premiered as one of several events to celebrate his seventieth birthday. The British prime minister, Edward Heath, gave a birthday dinner for Walton at 10 Downing Street, attended by royalty and Walton's most eminent colleagues; Britten presented a Walton evening at Aldeburgh and Previn conducted an all-Walton concert at the Royal Festival Hall.

Walton revised the score of Troilus and Cressida, and the opera was staged at Covent Garden in 1976. Once again it was plagued by misfortune while in preparation. Walton was in poor health; Previn, who was to conduct, also fell ill; and the tenor chosen for Troilus pulled out. As in 1954, the critics were generally tepid. Some of Walton's final artistic endeavours were in collaboration with the film-maker Tony Palmer. Walton took part in Palmer's profile of him, At the Haunted End of the Day, in 1981, and in 1982 Walton and his wife played the cameo roles of King Frederick Augustus and Queen Maria of Saxony in Palmer's nine-hour film Wagner. In March 1982 there were concerts marking Walton's eightieth birthday, at the Barbican and Royal Festival halls. The audience's response to the performance of Belshazzar's Feast, at the latter, conducted by Previn, moved the composer to tears.

Walton died at La Mortella on 8 March 1983, at the age of 80. His ashes were buried on Ischia, and a memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey, where a commemorative stone to Walton was unveiled near those to Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten.

Music
Walton was a slow worker. Both during composition and afterwards he would continually revise his music; he said, "Without an india-rubber I was absolutely sunk." Consequently, his total body of work from his sixty-year career as a composer is not large. Between the first performance of Façade in 1923, for example, and that of the Sinfonia Concertante in 1928, he averaged only one small piece a year. Of his work as a whole, Byron Adams in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians writes:

"Walton's music has often been too neatly dismissed by a few descriptive tags: 'bittersweet', 'nostalgic' and, after World War II, 'same as before'. Such convenient categorizations ignore the expressive variety of his music and slight his determination to deepen his technical and expressive resources as he grew older. His early discovery of the basic elements of his style allowed him to assimilate successfully an astonishing number of disparate and apparently contradictory influences, such as Anglican anthems, jazz, and the music of Stravinsky, Sibelius, Ravel and Elgar."

The writer adds that Walton's allegiance to his basic style never wavered and that this loyalty to his own vision, together with his rhythmic vitality, sensuous melancholy, sly charm and orchestral flair, gives Walton's finest music "an imperishable glamour". Another biographer of Walton, Neil Tierney, writes that although contemporary critics felt that the post-war music did not match Walton's pre-war compositions, it has become clear that the later works are "if emotionally less direct, more profound."

Overtures and short orchestral pieces
Walton's first work for full orchestra, Portsmouth Point (1925), inspired by a Rowlandson print of the same name, depicts a rumbustious dockside scene (in Kennedy's phrase, "the sailors of H.M.S. Pinafore have had a night on the tiles") in a fast moving score full of syncopation and cross-rhythm that for years proved hazardous for conductors and orchestras alike. Throughout his career, Walton wrote works in this pattern, such as the lively Comedy Overture Scapino, a virtuoso piece commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, described by The Musical Times as "an ingenious blending of fragments in exhilarating profusion." Walton's post-war works in this genre are the Johannesburg Festival Overture (1956), the "diverting but hard-edged Capriccio burlesco" (1968), and the longer Partita (1957), written for the Cleveland Orchestra, described by Grove as "an impressively concentrated score with a high-spirited finale [with] steely counterpoint and orchestral virtuosity". Walton's shorter pieces also include two tributes to musical colleagues, Variations on a Theme by Hindemith (1963) and the Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten (1969), in both of which the source material is gradually transformed as Walton's own voice becomes more prominent. The critic Hugh Ottaway commented that in both pieces "the interaction of two musical personalities is... fascinating".

Concertos and symphonies
Walton's first successful large-scale concert work, the Viola Concerto (1929) is in marked contrast to the raucous Portsmouth Point; despite the common influence of jazz and of the music of Hindemith and Ravel, in its structure and romantic longing it owes much to the Elgar Cello Concerto. In this work, wrote Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor in The Record Guide, "the lyric poet in Walton, who had so far been hidden under a mask of irony, fully emerged." Walton followed this pattern in his two subsequent concertos, for Violin (1937) and for Cello (1956). Each opens reflectively, is in three movements, and contrasts agitated and jagged passages with warmer romantic sections. The Cello Concerto is more introspective than the two earlier concertos, with a ticking rhythm throughout the work suggesting the inexorable passage of time.

The two symphonies are strongly contrasted with one another. The First is on a large scale, reminiscent at times of Sibelius. Grove says of the work that its "orgiastic power, coruscating malice, sensuous desolation and extroverted swagger" make the symphony a tribute to Walton's tenacity and inventive facility. Critics have always differed on whether the finale lives up to the rest of the work. In comparison with the First, the Second Symphony struck many reviewers as lightweight, and, as with many of Walton's works of the 1950s, it was regarded as old-fashioned. It is a very different kind of work from the First Symphony. David Cox describes it as "more a divertimento than a symphony ... highly personal, unmistakably Walton throughout", and Kennedy calls it "somewhat enigmatic in mood, and a superb example of Walton's more mature, concise, and mellow post-1945 style."

Music for ballets, plays and films
Although generally a slow and perfectionist composer, Walton was capable of working quickly when necessary. Some of his stage and screen music was written to tight deadlines. He regarded his ballet and incidental music as of less importance than his concert works and was generally dismissive of what he produced.

Of his ballets for Sadler's Wells, The Wise Virgins (1940) is an arrangement of eight extracts from choral and instrumental music by Bach. The Quest (1943), written in great haste, is, according to Grove, oddly reminiscent of Vaughan Williams. Neither of these works established itself in the regular repertoire, unlike the ballet score Walton arranged from the music of Façade, the music for which was expanded for full orchestra, still retaining the jazz influences and the iconoclastic wit of the original. Music from The Quest and the whole of the Viola Concerto were used for another Sadler's Wells ballet, O.W., in 1972.

Walton wrote little incidental music for the theatre, his music for Macbeth (1942) being one of his most notable contributions to the genre.

Between 1934 and 1969 he wrote the music for 13 films. He arranged the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue from his own score for The First of the Few (1942). He allowed suites to be arranged from his Shakespeare film scores of the 1940s and 1950s; in these films, he mixed Elizabethan pastiche with wholly characteristic Waltonian music. Kennedy singles out for praise the Agincourt battle sequence in Henry V, where the music makes the charge of the French knights "fearsomely real." Despite Walton's view that film music is ineffective when performed out of context, suites from several more of his filmscores have been assembled since his death.

Opera
Walton worked for many years on his only full-length opera, Troilus and Cressida, both before its premiere and afterwards. It has never been regarded as a success. The libretto is generally considered weak, and Walton's music, despite many passages that have won critical praise, is not dramatic enough to sustain interest. Grove calls the work a partially successful attempt to revivify the traditions of nineteenth-century Italian opera in a post-war era wary of heroic Romanticism.

Walton's only other opera, The Bear, based on a comic vaudeville by Chekhov, was much better received. The critic Andrew Porter described it in The Musical Times as "one of the strongest and most brilliant things Walton has written". It is, however, a one-act piece, a genre not regularly staged at most opera houses, and so is infrequently seen. Operabase recorded four productions of the piece worldwide between 2013 and 2015.

Chamber and solo works
Apart from an early experiment in atonalism in his String Quartet (1919–22), which he later described as "full of undigested Bartók and Schoenberg", Walton's major essays in chamber music are his String Quartet in A Minor (1945–46) and the Sonata for Violin and Piano (1947–49). In the opinion of Adams in Grove's Dictionary, the quartet is one of Walton's supreme achievements. Earlier critics did not always share this view. In 1956 The Record Guide said, "[T]he material is not first class and the composition as a whole seems laboured."

The String Quartet in A Minor exists also in its later expanded form as the Sonata for String Orchestra (1971), which, the critic Trevor Harvey wrote, combines Walton in his most energetically rhythmic mood with a "vein of lyrical tenderness which is equally characteristic and is so rewarding to listen to". . Malcolm Arnold undertook some of the transcription involved in this expansion of forces. The work was premiered by Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in March 1972 at the Perth Festival in Australia; the same performers gave the British premiere in Bath later that month.

The Violin Sonata is in two closely related movements, with strong thematic material in common. The first movement is nostalgically lyrical, the second a set of variations, each one a semitone higher than its predecessor. Walton briefly refers back to Schoenberg with a dodecaphonic passage in the second movement, but otherwise the sonata is firmly tonal.

The Five Bagatelles for Guitar were written for, and edited by, the guitarist Julian Bream and dedicated to Arnold. Kennedy describes them as "among Walton's most piquant and delightful miniatures. He exploits the guitar's resources to the full and the music always sounds Waltonian".

Choral and other vocal music
Walton's liturgical compositions include the Coronation Te Deum (1952), Missa brevis (1966), Jubilate Deo (1972), and Magnificat and Nunc dimittis (1974), and the anthems A Litany (1916) and Set me as a seal upon thy heart (1938). One of the best-known and most frequently performed of Walton's works is the cantata Belshazzar's Feast. Written for large orchestra, chorus and baritone soloist, it intersperses a choral and orchestral depiction of Babylonian excess and depravity, barbaric jazzy outbursts, and the lamentations and finally the rejoicing of the Jewish captives. The "couple of brass bands" added at Beecham's suggestion to an already large orchestra each consist of three trumpets, three trombones and a tuba. Many critics judged it the most important English choral work since Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius in 1900. None of Walton's later choral works have matched its popularity. They include In Honour of the City of London (1937) and a Gloria (1960–61) composed for the 125th anniversary of the Huddersfield Choral Society.

Recordings
From the days of 78 rpm discs, when relatively little modern music was being put on record, Walton was favoured by the record companies. In 1929 the small, new Decca company recorded eleven movements from Façade, with the composer conducting a chamber ensemble, with the speakers Edith Sitwell and Walton's friend and colleague Constant Lambert. In the 1930s, Walton also had two of his major orchestral works on disc, both on Decca, the First Symphony recorded by Harty and the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Viola Concerto with Frederick Riddle and the LSO conducted by the composer. In the 1940s Walton moved from Decca to its older, larger rival, EMI. The EMI producer Walter Legge arranged a series of recordings of Walton's major works and many minor ones over the next twenty years; a rival composer expressed the view that if Walton had an attack of flatulence (he used an earthier expression), Walter Legge would record it.

Walton himself, although a reluctant conductor, conducted many of the EMI recordings, and some for other labels. He made studio recordings of the First Symphony, the Viola Concerto, the Violin Concerto, the Sinfonia Concertante, the Façade Suites, the Partita, Belshazzar's Feast, and suites from his film scores for Shakespeare plays and The First of the Few. Some live performances conducted by Walton were recorded and have been released on compact disc, including the Cello Concerto and the Coronation Te Deum.

Almost all Walton's works have been recorded for commercial release. EMI published a "Walton Edition" of his major works on CD in the 1990s, and the recording of the Chandos Records "Walton Edition" of his works was completed in 2010. His best-known works have been recorded by performers from many countries. Among the frequently recorded are Belshazzar's Feast, the Viola and Violin Concertos and the First Symphony, which has had some thirty recordings since Harty's 1936 set.

Legacy
In 1944, it was said of Walton that he summed up the recent past of English music and augured its future. Later writers have concluded that Walton had little influence on the next generation of composers. In his later years, Walton formed friendships with younger composers including Hans Werner Henze and Malcolm Arnold, but although he admired their work, he did not influence their compositional styles. Throughout his life, Walton held no posts at music conservatoires; he had no pupils, gave no lectures and wrote no essays. After his death, the Walton Trust, inspired by Susana Walton, has run arts education projects, promoted British music and held annual summer masterclasses on Ischia for gifted young musicians.

title: William Walton