page_title: Twickenham
section_title: Neighbourhoods and geography
hierarchical_section_title: Twickenham / Neighbourhoods and geography
caption_attribution_description: English: Stone on wall of Radnor House, Cross Deep, Twickenham, recording Alexander Pope's grotto, a Grade 2* listed monument, which survives under the main road, between the site of Pope's house and his garden.
context_page_description: Twickenham is a suburban town in south west London, England. It lies on the River Thames and is 9.9 miles west-southwest of Charing Cross, 2 miles south-east of Hounslow, and 2.6 miles north-west of Kingston upon Thames. Historically part of Middlesex, it has formed part of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames since 1965. The population of the town, including its localities St Margarets and Whitton, was 62,148 as of 2011.
  Twickenham has an extensive town centre and is famous for being the home of rugby union in England, with hundreds of thousands of spectators visiting Twickenham Stadium, the world's largest rugby stadium, each year. The historic riverside area is famous for its network of 18th-century buildings and pleasure grounds, many of which survive 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. Among these is the Neo-Gothic prototype home of Horace Walpole which has given its name to a whole district, Strawberry Hill, and is linked with the oldest Roman Catholic university in the country, St Mary's University.
context_section_description: The neighbourhoods are:
  Strawberry Hill – South
  Kneller – West and South Whitton
  Eel Pie Island – Center and Richmond Thames Territory
  Twickenham Centre
  St Margaret's – East
  Cole Park – North
  Stadium Village – North and East Whitton
  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 southeastern 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.
caption: A memorial plaque to Pope's Grotto
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