Каули: История пригородной деревни в Великобритании

Suburban village in the United Kingdom

Cowley '/k//aʊ//l//i/ is a village contiguous with the town of Uxbridge in the London Borough of Hillingdon. A largely suburban village with 16 listed buildings, Cowley is 15.4 miles (24.8 km) west of Charing Cross, bordered to the west by Uxbridge Moor in the Green Belt and the River Colne, forming the border with Buckinghamshire. Cowley was an ancient parish in the historic county of Middlesex.

Cowley's name is believed to be derived from the Anglo Saxon Cofenlea: "Cofa's woodland clearing." The earliest written record of the settlement is from 959.

St. Laurence Church was in recorded as in the parish of Cowley in the 1086 Domesday Book along with the parish land owned by Westminster Abbey, valued as worth to its lord two pounds per year in 1066 and at one pound ten shillings in 1086. Its independent male householders were two villagers, one cottage owner with one cultivated ploughland for one lord's plough team. Lord's lands (also referred to as a manorial park) took up 1.5 ploughs of land, and meadow land half a plough. The woodland was worth forty pigs (per year) and a mill was worth for five shillings per year. Cowley was surrounded by Hillingdon parish, of which the town of Uxbridge itself and Uxbridge Moor, which separated Cowley from Buckinghamshire on the west, formed part. Part of the Moor is now the M25 motorway. While Hillingdon parish administered to many areas now in Cowley, most of these were in one manor within Hillingdon whose name is preserved by few places in maps, Colham. The Peche family held the manor for over a hundred years and by 1358 its name had become Couele Peche (Cowley Peachey). This was first recorded in the Calendar of Inquisitions post mortem. Packet Boat Lane and the former Paddington Packet Boat public house, licensed in 1804, reflect this period. Four hundred yards south of Cowley Lock a 350 yard arm of the Grand Union Canal called Cowley Hall Dock was opened in 1811 to service the Cowley Hall Brick Field. Between March and October 1814 four million bricks were delivered from the brick field. With this early development of Cowley's brick earth deposits the generic name of the brick in West Middlesex became known as the Cowley Stock Brick.

In 1856 a Great Western Railway branch line opened, operating between West Drayton station in Yiewsley on the Great Western Main Line and Uxbridge Vine Street Station. The railway encouraged the development of Cowley becoming a centre of market and nursery gardens, supplying fresh flowers to the markets at Covent Garden and Spitalfields. Despite the spread of building from Uxbridge in the north, the beginnings of industry at Cowley Peachey and the three large mills just outside the western boundary of the parish, Cowley remained an almost entirely rural village until after World War I. In 1891, just before the parish was enlarged, the population was 322. In 1901, after the enlargement, it was 869, and this had only risen to 1,170 by 1931. During the 1930s there was a good deal of building, partly by Uxbridge council, and the population of the same area was 3,687 in 1951. Until 1965 a great many more houses were built, bringing the total provided by the council to nearly 1,000 in 1959, so that much of the area east of the main road and south of Station Road has been covered, though allotments remain between Hillingdon and Cowley.

Little Britain Lake in the west of Cowley extends for about 450 metres between the Colne and a channel of it known as Frays River. The lake, which is in the Colne Valley Regional Park conservation area, is roughly the shape of the Great Britain. It is noted for less common water birds, such as gadwall and great crested grebe, and for more common species including mute swan and grey heron.

A number of older buildings survive, forming in Cowley all but one of the 15 architecturally listed buildings, the other being the main lecture building of Brunel University. Cowley House, and the Manor Farm are the most architecturally and historically significant. It stands near the River Pinn and was on the eastern side of the Cowley Manor. There is no evidence historically of there being a settlement of any size here, though there were probably always one or two buildings beside the Church.

The main "Uxbridge campus" of the university is in the north east of Cowley. Iver 1.9 mile (3 km)