page_title: Surbiton
section_title: Resident artists and writers
hierarchical_section_title: Surbiton / Popular culture and notable residents / Resident artists and writers
caption_attribution_description: English: The clock tower, Surbiton, built to celebrate the Coronation of King Edward VII, 1902
context_page_description: Surbiton is a suburban neighbourhood of south-west London, within the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. It is situated next to the River Thames, 11 miles southwest of Charing Cross. Formerly part of the ancient parish of Kingston upon Thames in the county of Surrey, it has been part of Greater London since 1965. Surbiton comprises four of the RBK's wards: Alexandra, Berrylands, St. Mark's, and Surbiton Hill.
  Founded originally as Kingston-upon-Railway during the Industrial Revolution, Surbiton possesses a mixture of grand 19th-century townhouses, Art Deco courts, and more recent residential blocks blending in with semi-detached 20th-century housing estates. With a population of 45,132 in 2016, it accounts for approximately 25% of the total population of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. Surbiton extends over an area of 7.18 km².
context_section_description: The Pre-Raphaelite painters John Everett Millais (1829–1896) and William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) came to Surbiton in 1851, 26 years before Richard Jefferies (1848–1887). Millais used the Hogsmill River, in Six Acre Meadow, Tolworth, as the background for his painting Ophelia. Holman Hunt used the fields just south of this spot as the background to The Hireling Shepherd.
  In the mid-1870s the novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) lived in a house called 'St. David's Villa' in Hook Road, Surbiton for a year after his marriage to Emma Gifford. H.G.Wells, in his comic novel The Wheels of Chance, describes the cycle collision of 'Mr Hoopdriver' and a 'Young Lady in Grey'; the young lady approaching 'along an affluent from the villas of Surbiton'. The writer Enid Blyton was governess to a Surbiton family for four years from 1920, at a house called 'Southernhay', also on the Hook Road. C. H. Middelton (1886–1945), who broadcast on gardening during the Second World War, lived in Surbiton, where he died suddenly outside his home. The artist who brought Rupert the Bear to life for a whole generation, Alfred Bestall, sketched out his cartoons from his home in Cranes Park, Surbiton Hill.
caption: The clock tower, Surbiton, built to celebrate the Coronation of King Edward VII, 1902
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