Chiswick Timeline of Writers & Books: A quick guide
“Only connect” wrote EM Forster in Howards End and that could be the motto of the Chiswick Timeline of Writers and Books. For over 20 years, Forster lived in Chiswick where he is celebrated with a blue plaque (above left), and a key scene in the celebrated film of Howards End was filmed on Chiswick Mall, where William Thackeray went to school and set the opening chapter of Vanity Fair.
This ‘Writers Tales’ section includes anecdotes, articles and pictures about some of the writers who have lived in, or written about, Chiswick.
Contributors include the art historian Marina Vaizey (who tells how her husband John arranged the blue plaque for EM Forster); the artist Fay Ballard (who describes walks with her father, JG Ballard, in Chiswick House, right); journalists, local historians and others. We are very grateful to them and are adding more stories: please email suggestions to admin@chiswickbookfestival.net
See more in our Writers Trail, which lists 36 notable writers who have lived in Chiswick. There are mini-biographies of 70 of the writers on the Writers’ Lives pages.
Tales of those on the Writers Trail:
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- JG Ballard & Sir Peter Blake at Chiswick House
(Drawing, above, with the author’s daughter Fay, as a baby) - James Berry: Poet of the Windrush Generation
- John Betjeman and the Battle of Bedford Park (Image, top centre)
- Anthony Burgess in Chiswick
- Michael Flanders & Stephen Potter, Humorists
. - EM Forster and the Chiswick blue plaque
- Alain-Fournier, The Great Gatsby and a party in Chiswick
- Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, at Chiswick House
- Nancy Mitford at Strand on the Green
- William Morris in Chiswick
- Iris Murdoch in Chiswick
. - John Osborne and Look Back in Anger
- Harold Pinter and The Caretaker
- Alexander Pope in Chiswick
- Sergius Stepniak: The Railway Children & Death of an Anarchist
- Six centuries of Chiswick poets
. - Dylan Thomas in Chiswick
- Thackeray, Vanity Fair and Chiswick Mall
- WB Yeats in Bedford Park
Beyond the Writers Trail:
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- James & Cosmo Clark: WW1 artists in Bedford Park
- Thomas Layton: Born in Chiswick, bred in Brentford
- Queen Victoria in Chiswick (and Prince Albert)
(Print, below, The Royal Garden Party at Chiswick)
- Chiswick Library: Sanderson, Fournier and Miliband
- Chiswick Press and The Chiswick Shakespeare
- Chiswick in WW2: Monty, Miliband and Molly Rich
- Chiswick’s gardeners: Kent, Lindley, Paxton & the RHS
- Chiswick’s theatres, playwrights and performers (image, top right)
- Chiswick’s writers by the River Thames
- Literary links live on in Bedford Park
The Chiswick Timeline of Writers and Books: How it grew
The Chiswick Timeline of Writers & Books lists around 425 writers who have written a book and lived in Chiswick W4, or written books about the area. See A Quick Guide.