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THIS IS LONGFORD Now in our sixteenth century! The Duke of Northumberland's River
This page was last updated on
17 May 2007 |
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The Duke of Northumberland's River Based on an article by Les Love in The Historian, Issue 123, The Chronicles of the West Drayton and District Local History Society (September 2000). The Duke of Northumberland's River is another artificial river and is a branch of the River Colne. The river was for many years owned by the Dukes of Northumberland whose family bought it from King James the First in 1603-5 along with the former abbey of Syon at Isleworth, which is now their stately home of Syon Park. The Dukedom was not created until 1766 and before that the stream was called the Old River to distinguish it from the nearby New River or King's River (now known as the Longford River) which is the other artificial river of Middlesex and which dates from 1688. But the Duke's River is much older than that having probably been constructed in the 15th or 16th centuries and was originally known as the Isleworth Mill Stream, or River, a name that indicated its purpose of providing power to the manorial water mill at Isleworth on the Thames. It is impossible to say exactly when the river was first cut. It may have been made by the abbey of Syon to provide power for its mill at Isleworth. King Henry V granted the manor to the nuns in 1415 although the abbey church was not consecrated until 1488. King Henry VIII suppressed Syon in 1539 and the manorial mill passed to the Crown. In 1543 a sum of £120 was granted to the lessee, John Gates, for a water mill at Isleworth. A year later, a further grant was made to Gates, which was to be spent in the construction of a stream beginning at 'Olde Ford' within the Parish of Harmondsworth to increase the waters and pools of two mills at Isleworth. From this it appears that the Longford section of the Duke's River was constructed in the reign of Henry VIII. The original cut did not leave the Colne where it does now. Rather it began near the site of the old Longford Mill. It ran south from there in the proximity of what is now Heathrow Close. As the millers of Longford continually dammed the Duke's River during Elizabethan times, something had to be done. In 1575, a scheme was prepared to make a new cut from Longford about one mile further upstream which forms the course of the Duke's River as it is now. The Court of Exchequer authorised the work to be done in February 1579. This work allowed Isleworth Mill to have its own stream independent from the Longford Mill. The old cuts were filled in and the old bridge that had crossed the river at Longford was taken down and reconstructed over the new stream. In the latter years of the First World War, Middlesex County Council (MCC) proposed that the river should pass into public ownership. In May 1920, the Duke's agents wrote to the Council saying that the Duke felt that in principal, this was the right way forward. By this time there were no more working mills left on the river which was accordingly producing very little income for the Duke. The river was now a white elephant involving not only upkeep of the watercourse but also most of the bridges. The Duke's main concern was to ensure that the river would continue to supply water to feed the ornamental lakes in the grounds of Syon Park. The Middlesex County Council Act of 1930 eventually transferred the river into the ownership of MCC with provision for the supply of water to Syon Park. Middlesex County Council was abolished in 1965 and ownership of the river passed to the new Greater London Council, which in turn dissolved in 1986. Responsibility for the river then passed to the Thames Water Authority, then to the National Rivers Authority in 1989. In 1996, the NRA was assimilated into the Environment Agency, which now maintains the Duke's River. The course of the river was changed in the 1947 as a result of the construction of Heathrow Airport so that at one point it went underground and shared a channel with the Longford River. The course of the river has been altered again to allow for the construction of Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5. In a project known as the 'Twin Rivers Diversion Scheme, both the Longford River and the Duke of Northumberland's River have been put in adjoining channels running around the western perimeter of the site at ground level, no longer having to pass under the airport. The Duke of Northumberland's River part of this project is due to be complete in April 2004. A specialist team captured fish from the river near the Terminal 5 site at Heathrow Airport. The fish were moved from the Duke of Northumberland's River to allow them to colonise the new river channel before the water was diverted along its new path. Approved electro-fishing techniques which do not harm the fish were used to capture them. The same process was earlier carried out with the Longford River which also ran directly under the T5 construction site, in west London.
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