Strand-on-the-Green is the name of the picturesque waterside row of houses of many shapes and sizes that extends along the Middlesex foreshore from Kew Bridge towards Chiswick. It is a kind of home-grown Venice, and sometimes, when the Thames is in flood, its feet are dabbled in the water, and ingenious ways with planks and clay are resorted to for the keeping of the river out of ground floors. But since the Thames has become more and more curbed and regulated, these occasions have grown and are still growing fewer. I do not know where is the “Green” of Strand-on-the-Green, and the “strand” itself that stretches down to the river at low tide from the brick-and-asphalted walk in front of the village, or hamlet—by whichever name we are rightly to entitle the place—is mostly mud, where the rankly-growing grass ceases. Old boats and barges that long since grew beyond any more patching and mending, and were not worth even breaking up, have been left here to lie about, half in mud and half in water, grass growing in them.
And an island lies in mid-stream; an island on which, for many years past, men may have been observed wheeling barrows to and fro and engaged in other apparently aimless activities that certainly during the last thirty years have had no beginning and no end. It is a picturesque island, with flourishing trees, and it looks a most desirable Robinson Crusoe kind of a place, especially when viewed from the trains, that just here cross the river on an ugly lattice-girder bridge. A timber gantry projects from one side, and things are done with old boilers and launches. Repairs are occasionally made to the banks of this island, and they have at last resulted in making it a very solid and substantial place, faced upstream and down and round about with bags of concrete; so that no conceivable Thames flood that ever was, or can be, could possibly wash it away.
There is half a mile of Strand-on-the-Green. It is a fairly complete and representative community, comprising in its one row of houses those of an almost stately residential class, including Zoffany House, where the painter of that name lived and died at last in 1810; some lesser houses, a number of cottages housing a waterside population, three inns, the “Bull’s Head,” the “City Barge,” and the “Bell and Crown”; and some shops of an obscure kind, such as one might expect to see only in remote villages. A highly-sketchable old malthouse or two and a row of almshouses complete the picture. As to the almshouses, they are going on for the completion of their second century, as a tablet on them declares: