THE NAME BOSTON is often associated with a revolutionary tea party in a former British possession. Some might also associate it with a town in Lincolnshire. And Londoners might connect it with a tube station on the Piccadilly Line of the London Underground. The station, which is a stop on the line to Heathrow Airport is Boston Manor, a place which I first visited in April of this year (2021).

In the case of Boston Manor, the name Boston is derived from an older name ‘Bordeston’, which comes from the word ‘borde’, meaning ‘boundary’. Another etymology of the name, which is unrelated to that of the Boston in Lincolnshire, is that it derives from the name of a Saxon farmer named ‘Bord’. Whatever the origin of the name, Boston Manor, the house and its lovely gardens, stand on the border between Hanwell and Brentford.

Until the Priory of St Helens in Bishopsgate was suppressed in 1538 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Helen%27s_Church,_Bishopsgate), the Manor of Bordeston was owned by it. King Edward VI granted it to Edward, Duke of Somerset (1500-1552), Lord Protector of England during the earlier part of Edward VI’s reign, and later it reverted to the Crown. In 1552, Queen Elizabeth I gave the manor to the Earl of Leicester, who immediately sold it to the merchant and financier Sir Thomas Gresham (c1519-1579). After several changes of ownership, the property was sold in 1670 to the City merchant James Clitherow (1618-1681; www.bhsproject.co.uk/families_clitherow.shtml). James demolished the existing manor house. He modified and enlarged Boston House, originally built by Lady Reade in 1622 in the Jacobean style. This house with three gables still stands but is closed as it is undergoing extensive repairs. It looks out onto grounds planted with fine trees, many of them cedars of Lebanon. The grounds that include a small lake slope down towards the River Brent.  The house and grounds, Boston Manor Park, remained in the possession on of the Clitherow family until 1923, when Colonel John Bourchier Stracey-Clitherow (1853-1931) sold the house and what was left of the estate (after some of it had been sold to property developers) to the then local authority, Brentford Urban District Council. During his military career, this gentleman was taken prisoner during the ill-fated Jameson Raid in South Africa, a prelude to the Second Anglo-Boer War.

Before the Clitherows began selling off their land at Boston manor, there was a house in the grounds called ‘Little Boston’. It stood until the early 1920s when it was sold to a developer named Jackman, who demolished it to build houses now standing on Windmill Road (https://littleealinghistory.org.uk/node/6). John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), who became the sixth president of the USA in 1825, resided in Little Boston house between 1815 and 1817 whilst he was American minister to Britain during that period. Adams was born in Massachusetts. So, it seems fitting that he lived in a house and an estate both bearing the name of an important city in that American state.

On our way to see our friend who took us to see Boston Manor House and Park, we drove along a road named in memory of the Clitherow family. Sadly, what with the building works and covid19 restrictions, we were unable to view the fine interior of Boston Manor House. However, the garden and its lake, where we spotted its resident tortoise sunning itself on a log, proved to be a lovely surprise, well worth visiting … and you need not cross the Atlantic to get there from London.