‘I played on a River Thames island as a kid, now I’ve explored over 100 islands’ – My London

Miranda Vickers had spent the best part of a decade reporting from war-torn Kosovo. As a war correspondent she saw the horrors of war up close. When it was all over and she came back to England, she needed some solace. As a child she'd play for hours on end on a little island in the Thames called Chiswick Eyot.

So, it was there that she begun an epic four-year journey that would see her explore more than a hundred River Thames islands and be the first person to write a book about them.

"I needed to step back and see the world could be quite a beautiful place and it's not all blood and betrayal and misery. The relief of writing this flowed from me. It was a form of escapism," she tells me over coffee not far from her Ealing home.

"Growing up with the river it was always somewhere to gravitate to. It was rather stinky in the '60s and a dead river and nobody swam in it. You were told you would die if you swam in it. But from the age of about seven my mother would take me down to the foreshore at Strand-on-the-Green and we'd have picnics and I'd be rummaging for bits of old treasure.

READ MORE: 'I built my dream home on a private island in the middle of the River Thames'

"Little Chiswick Eyot was on my doorstep. This wonderful little island was so mysterious. It had a little beach and was like a little microcosm of a far away treasure island on our doorstep.

"Every Sunday and weekends, mum used to drive us down there with a little flask and packs of sandwiches and leave us there all day. We'd wade across to the island." Chiswick Eyot just happened to be the last working Osiery on the Thames where people still harvested the long reeds called Osiers that come from willow trees - and wove them into baskets for the London markets. Miranda and her cousin cut them down with penknives and used them to build dens.

"We'd stand on the prow of the island like it was a boat and smoke our cigarettes - bearing in mind we were ten or 11 years old, we used to buy them and kept our secret supply in our camp," laughs Miranda. "We used to swim off the tiny beach on the far side of the island. You could swim quite far out into the river until you reached a terribly dangerous current which could literally suck you in.

"The smell of Thames mud in the back of my mum's car when she came to pick us up is one of those things that still sticks in my memory. It was the most idyllic time like Swallows and Amazons. We bunked off school - I hated my Conservative Catholic girls' convent.

"My single mum couldn't keep that much of an eye on me, I was a bit of a rebel. It was an element of freedom that I don't think sadly many kids get today. I mean who would leave two little girls of eight, nine or ten alone for a whole day?

"We had to be inventive. We had penknives and we cut the osiers and made a bivouac and covered it in moss to make it waterproof and we'd hunker down in it and watch for the 'Americans' coming.

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"At the end of the summer were were sun burnt brown and our bare feet were tough as anything. Covered in mud at the end of the day, the bath water would be black and our clothes used to stink," Miranda shrugs.

"We got rescued a couple of times when the tide came up by the riverboat police. But they were forever rescuing kids as they were everywhere along the river banks in those days." This was a time of course when the Thames was a working river and was still very dirty, being used constantly by barges and lighters.

Inspired by her return to Chiswick Eyot, Miranda started writing an article for the Ealing Historical Association about it and her interest was reignited. She soon started exploring more islands and her publishers were massively interested. The only catch was they wanted her to explore all 92 of them!

It took Miranda four-and-a-half years to reach all the islands! She bought a little inflatable motor boat with her husband and in summer they would explore together. Mooring up, her husband would often listen to the cricket on the radio while Miranda stomped about on the islands, measuring them, observing and meeting locals.

In the winter she would beaver away in library archives finding out as much as she could about the islands. By the second year she'd found 120 islands existed! Most of them were hardly known apart from the celebrated Eel Pie island where rock stars used to hang out.

The epic voyage started at Leigh-on-Sea at Canvey Island.

Miranda says: "It's one of the most maligned places in the UK but I loved it. I absolutely found it fascinating. I rang the Essex Tourist board and asked if they had any nice places to stay on Canvey Island and they burst out laughing!"

There were no more islands between here and Chiswick Eyot so the voyage resumed on Miranda's childhood haunt. Any islands further towards London had long since been eroded by the Thames tides, but the islands from Chiswick Eyot upstream had survived.

The voyage took the couple right out into Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire all the way to Lechlade, the official source of the Thames. "I met fascinating people and I discovered beaches and micro ecosystems. Various islands like Isleworth Ait have very rare mollusks on for example.," says Miranda. "The whole process made me realise that although there are other rivers in the world with islands, it's only on the Thames where they are little oasis of life.

"People say when they cross to the islands by ferry or boat or bridges they feel a weight has left their shoulders. The whole sort of romantic idea of islands is encapsulated in these little worlds."

Miranda's husband also warmed to the task as the voyage went on and eventually would enjoy swimming and picnicking.

"It brought us together," she says, half laughing!

Some of the islands are privately owned and there are strict conservation rules in place to stop them being eroded continually. But they are actually constantly in danger, not just from being flooded but from Mitten crabs which eat away at the earth, causing the soil to collapse. "There's lots of new species that have been introduced into the river over the last 20 or 30 years that are non-native and are invasive and are causing quite a lot of problems on the islands," says Miranda.

"They come in on the hulls of great trawlers from all over the world. Mitten crabs are especially attacking Chiswick Eyot and there's a programme to stop them by putting concrete base around part of the island."

The willow trees can also grow up to 70ft and have to be maintained so they don't fall into the river. But there's plenty of good reasons for preserving them. "I think people gravitate to islands. Look at Greece. Islands are a magnet. It's that sense of isolation and escapism. Stepping into another little world. In times of insecurity they become a refuge," says Miranda.

Miranda's favourite island is Platt's Eyot because it's the tallest in the river and "you have walk up a hill to a beautiful meadow covered in oxide daisies, wildflowers and poppies and you look down the cliff into the water. How long it will remain like that I don't know because developers are hovering around."

She adds: "The number of boatyards is diminishing rapidly and there's so much development. Time will tell if they build a residential block on it. They say they will resurrect the boat yard but what that really will look like we don't know.

"There have been two very mysterious fires and no-one'es ever been prosecuted. It's obvious who is behind it. The River Thames is a working river not the residential housing estate that it's becoming. That's the crisis the river is facing. Developers can add another 20-30,000 onto a flat if it's got a river view."

It's clear from talking to Miranda that the islands must be cherished and preserved. As she explains so passionately, they offer us somewhere we can return to nature and the natural rhythms of life, and in a world which is becoming madder day by day, this has to be worth fighting for.

Miranda's book Eyots and Aits, Islands of the River Thames is available here

Do you have a fascinating story or memories from the River Thames? Email martin.elvery@Reachplc.com

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'I played on a River Thames island as a kid, now I've explored over 100 islands' - My London