Place Name
Given its position running from town to the River Thames the name should come as no surprise. There’s no doubt the route was ancient but it was first featured in the court rolls of 1586 as “the lane from 4 Elms to the River”. By the start of the next century (1603) it was referred to as “the way that leads from the Street to Bayley’s Wharf” and by 1688 as Thames Lane before taking on its present name in 1693 when it had come into general use although it was also called Town Lane from the middle of the 17thCentury until 1712. Unsurprisingly, many of the people who lived down here worked on the water, Janet Dunbar in A Prospect of Richmond writes: “Many of the watermen lived here, either in tumbledown hovels or as lodgers in the taverns. The hovels were disparagingly referred to by the townspeople who wanted Richmond Bridge built from the end of Water Lane to the Twickenham Meadows; this would have entailed pulling down most of the buildings in Water Lane.” Despite objections that the project would not only lose them their employment and homes, the thing that did for the scheme was the Twickenham landowner who refused to allow an access road to be built across her property.
