Kew


Kew is a district in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. Its population at the 2011 census was 11,436. Kew is the location of the Royal Botanic Gardens, now a World Heritage Site, which includes Kew Palace. Kew is also the home of important historical documents such as Domesday Book, which is held at The National Archives.
Julius Caesar may have forded the Thames at Kew in 54 BC during the Gallic Wars. Successive Tudor, Stuart and Georgian monarchs maintained links with Kew. During the French Revolution, many refugees established themselves there and it was the home of several artists in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Since 1965 Kew has incorporated the former area of North Sheen which includes St Philip and All Saints, the first barn church consecrated in England. It is now in a combined Church of England parish with St Luke's Church, Kew.
Today, Kew is an expensive residential area because of its prosperous suburban attributes. Among these are sports-and-leisure open spaces, schools, transport links, architecture, restaurants, no high-rise buildings, modest road sizes, trees and gardens. Most of Kew developed in the late 19th century, following the arrival of the District line of the London Underground. Further development took place in the 1920s and 1930s when new houses were built on the market gardens of North Sheen and in the first decade of the 21st century when considerably more river-fronting flats and houses were constructed by the Thames on land formerly owned by Thames Water.

Etymology

The name Kew, recorded in 1327 as Cayho, is a combination of two words: the Old French kai and Old English hoh. The land spur is formed by the bend in the Thames.

Governance

is one of 18 wards in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. It forms part of the Richmond Park constituency in the UK Parliament; the Member of Parliament is Sarah Olney of the Liberal Democrats. For elections to the London Assembly it is part of the South West London Assembly constituency, which is represented by Gareth Roberts of the Liberal Democrats.
Kew was added in 1892 to the Municipal Borough of Richmond which had been formed two years earlier and was in the county of Surrey. In 1965, under the London Government Act 1963, the Municipal Borough of Richmond was abolished. Kew, along with Richmond, was transferred from Surrey to the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, one of 32 boroughs in the newly created Greater London.

Economy

's headquarters, now at Water Lane, Richmond, were previously in Mortlake Road, Kew.
A former industry in Kew was that of nameplate manufacturing, by the Caxton Name Plate Manufacturing Company, based on Kew Green. The company was founded in 1964 and folded in 1997.
It was in Kew that viscose was first developed into rayon, in a laboratory near Kew Gardens station run by Cowey Engineering. Rayon was produced in a factory on South Avenue, off Sandycombe Road, before Courtaulds acquired the patents for rayon in 1904.
Also on a site near Kew Gardens station, the engineering company F C Blake, now commemorated in the Kew street name Blake Mews, produced petrol-powered traction engines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Chrysler and Dodge

Kew Retail Park stands on the site of a former aircraft factory established in 1918 by Harry Whitworth, who owned Glendower Aircraft Ltd. The factory built Airco DH.4s and Sopwith Salamanders for the British government in the First World War.
In 1923, the now-redundant aircraft factory was sold and it became a factory for road vehicles. From the 1920s until 1967, Dodge made lorries at this factory, with the model name Kew. Cars were also manufactured there. Dodge Brothers became a Chrysler subsidiary in 1928 and lorry production moved to Chrysler's car plant at Kew. In 1933 it began to manufacture a British chassis, at its works in Kew, using American engines and gearboxes. After Chrysler bought the Maxwell Motor Company and their Kew works, the cars of the lighter Chrysler range – Chryslers, De Sotos and Plymouths – were assembled at this Kew site until the Second World War. The various models of De Sotos were named Richmond, Mortlake and Croydon; Plymouths were Kew Six and Wimbledon.
During the Second World War this Chrysler factory was part of the London Aircraft Production Group and built Handley Page Halifax aircraft assemblies. When wartime aircraft production ceased, the plant did not resume assembly of North American cars.

People

Royal associations with Kew

The Tudors and Stuarts

was granted lands at Kew in 1517. When he died in 1526 he left his Kew estates to his third wife, Eleanor, with the remainder to his son George. In 1538, Sir George Somerset sold the house for £200 to Thomas Cromwell, who resold it for the same amount to Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk. Brandon had probably already inhabited Kew during the life of his wife Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VII and widow of the French king Louis XII. According to John Leland's Cygnea Cantio, she stayed in Kew for a time after her return to England.
One of Henry VIII's closest friends, Henry Norris, lived at Kew Farm, which was later owned by Elizabeth I's favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. This large palatial house on the Thames riverbank predated the royal palaces of Kew Palace and the White House. Excavations at Kew Gardens in 2009 revealed a wall that may have belonged to the property.
In Elizabeth's reign, and under the Stuarts, houses were developed along Kew Green. West Hall, which survives in West Hall Road, dates from at least the 14th century and the present house was built at the end of the 17th century.
Elizabeth Stuart , daughter of James I, later known as the "Winter Queen", was given a household at Kew in 1608.
Queen Anne subscribed to the building of the parish church on Kew Green, which was dedicated to St Anne in 1714, three months before the queen's death.

The Hanoverians

The Hanoverians maintained the strongest links with Kew, in particular Princess Augusta who founded the botanic gardens and her husband Frederick, Prince of Wales who lived at the White House in Kew. Augusta, as Dowager Princess of Wales, continued to live there until her death in 1772. Frederick commissioned the building of the first substantial greenhouse at Kew Gardens.
In 1772 King George III and Queen Charlotte moved into the White House at Kew. Charlotte died at the Dutch House in 1818.
King William IV spent most of his early life at Richmond and at Kew Palace, where he was educated by private tutors.

Georgian expansion

During the French Revolution, many refugees established themselves in Kew, having built many of the houses of this period. In the 1760s and 1770s the presence of royalty attracted artists such as Thomas Gainsborough and Johann Zoffany.

Artists associated with Kew

  • Diana Armfield lives in Kew. She is known for landscapes, and has also painted portraits, literary subjects and still lifes. She has a particular interest in flower paintings, and is considered to owe much to the tradition of Walter Sickert.
  • Margaret Backhouse was a successful British portrait and genre painter during the 19th century who lived at Lichfield Villas.
  • Franz Bauer was an Austrian microscopist and botanical artist who became the first botanical illustrator at Kew Gardens. By 1790 he had settled at Kew, where as well as making detailed paintings and drawings of flower dissections, often at microscopic level, he tutored Queen Charlotte, her daughter Princess Elizabeth and William Hooker in the art of illustration, and often entertained friends and botanists at his home. He is buried at St Anne's, next to Thomas Gainsborough.
  • The American-born English artist Walter Deverell, who was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, lived at 352 Kew Road, then called Heathfield House. He had a studio at the end of the garden where there are now garages. In this setting he painted A Pet .
  • Bernard Dunstan lived in Kew. He was an artist, teacher and author, best known for his studies of figures in interiors and landscapes. At the time of his death, he was the longest serving Royal Academician.
  • George Engleheart, one of the greatest English painters of portrait miniatures, was born in Kew.
  • Walter Hood Fitch, botanical illustrator, lived on Kew Green.
  • Thomas Gainsborough, who is considered one of the most important British artists of the second half of the 18th century, visited Kew many times, staying with his friend Joshua Kirby and, after Kirby's death, in a house probably rented by his daughter close to St Anne's Church, where he is buried.
  • Arthur Hughes, Pre-Raphaelite painter, lived and died at Eastside House, 22 Kew Green. The site is marked by a blue plaque. Hughes is buried in Richmond Cemetery.
  • Tom Keating, artist, art restorer and art forger, lived in Kew from 1961 to 1967. He was best known for his highly publicised crusade against the art world, his trial for art fraud at the Old Bailey, and his critically acclaimed Channel 4 television series Tom Keating On Painters.
  • Joshua Kirby was a landscape painter, engraver, and writer, whose main artistic focus was "linear perspective", based on the ideas of English mathematician Brook Taylor. He was the son of topographer John Kirby, and the father of the writer Sarah Trimmer and the entomologist William Kirby. In 1760 he moved to Kew, where he taught linear perspective to George III. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society. He and his wife are buried in the churchyard of St Anne's.
  • Sir Peter Lely, portrait painter, had a house on the north side of Kew Green. On almost exactly the same site, Jeremiah Meyer, miniaturist to Queen Charlotte and George III, built a house a century later. Meyer is buried at St Anne's.
  • Charles Mozley, artist and art teacher, lived and died at 358 Kew Road, Kew.
  • Victorian artist Marianne North did not live in Kew, but she left to Kew Gardens her collection of botanic art, painted on her extensive overseas travels, and funded a gallery – the Marianne North Gallery – to house them.
  • French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro stayed in 1892 at 10 Kew Green, on the corner of Gloucester Road, now marked by a blue plaque. During his stay he painted Kew Gardens – Path to the Great Glasshouse , Kew Greens and Church at Kew . His third son, Félix Pissarro, painter, etcher and caricaturist, died in a sanatorium at 262 Kew Road in 1897.
  • Charles Shannon, artist best known for his portraits, died in Kew at 21 Kew Gardens Road.
  • Matilda Smith, the first official botanical artist of the Royal Botanic Gardens, lived at Gloucester Road, Kew.
  • The painter Johan Zoffany, who lived at Strand-on-the-Green, is buried in St Anne's churchyard.