Hollywood loves a land that time forgot: any mythical, feral, fantastical, fun place that decided it was perfectly fine as it was, thank you, when the world moved on.

Well, some exist – and one of them is a speck of rock in west London’s River Thames. The private, mostly residential Eel Pie Island is an improbable blend of all the best, reality-defying bits of Lamma Island, the 1960s, San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill and those few square metres of Ubud, Bali, not yet defiled by tourist buses.

For two weekends a year in June or July – and perhaps a third, in December, but as with much of what happens in a semi-believable land the rules are fluid – the “square” world is permitted to taste Eel Pie Island’s otherwise forbidden fruit. Then, the general public is welcome to cross from Twickenham on the mainland via the single fixed route (a narrow, pedestrian bridge dating from 1957) to the reservation and visit the premises of the creative natives.

Painters’, potters’ and printmakers’ dens; functioning boatyards and earthbound, desiccated dinghies; nautical memorabilia and junk; pavement sculptures, tropical-temperate jungle; and ugly sandals and patchwork-quilt trousers dazzle the lucky – yes, lucky – visitor.

Because even artists must make a living, vulgar commerce might lie behind the lowering of the metaphorical drawbridge. But whatever the prompt, for those precious weekends their studios throw wide their doors. When the traffic-free, entry fee-free island is nominally closed, however, visitors find little accessible but its central footpath. That leads to a dead end near where the Eel Pie Island Hotel stood before it was destroyed in a “mysterious” fire in 1971, having previously been commandeered by Britain’s biggest hippie commune.

With it went a chunk of music history: the hotel had hosted performances by The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Who, Eric Clapton and numerous other future titans. But their connection with the island is at least commemorated in the Eel Pie Island Museum, back across the water in Twickenham.

Celebrated ex-Eel residents include wind-up radio inventor Trevor Baylis and William Hartnell, the original Doctor Who – it is appropriate, for a Time Lord, that Eel Pie Island is in a time warp. Among the transients can be counted a certain Charles Dickens, in whose 1839 novel Nicholas Nickleby the rock appears.

At roughly 500 metres long by 140 metres wide, with a nature reserve at each pointed end, Eel Pie Island somehow finds space for houses or flats for 120 or so residents, many with rowing boats lashed to pontoons at the ends of their gardens, and 26 artists’ studios.

But even after invasion by mainlanders it retains a bohemian-tinted mystique. Was its name really inspired by pies baked with Thames eels and sold to passing boatmen? Who smashed a monstrous ice-cream cone into the roof of Loveshack cottage? And do pop-rock band the B-52s really live there?

Eel Pie Island is slippery like that.

Getting there

Eel Pie Island is 30 minutes by train from central London to Twickenham station, then 15 minutes walk. Visit eelpieislandartists.co.uk for more information.

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