Bavin's Gulls

The Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, was a civilian hospital and a centre for research into rheumatism in children until its closure in 1985.

Cliveden (pronounced ) is an English country house and estate in the care of the National Trust in Buckinghamshire, on the border with Berkshire. The Italianate mansion, also known as Cliveden House, crowns an outlying ridge of the Chiltern Hills close to the South Bucks villages of Burnham and Taplow. The main house sits 40 metres (130 ft) above the banks of the River Thames, and its grounds slope down to the river. There have been three houses on this site: the first, built in 1666, burned down in 1795 and the second house (1824) was also destroyed by fire, in 1849. The present Grade I listed house was built in 1851 by the architect Charles Barry for the 2nd Duke of Sutherland. Cliveden has been the home to a Prince of Wales, two Dukes, an Earl, and finally the Viscounts Astor. As the home of Nancy Astor, wife of the 2nd Viscount Astor, Cliveden was the meeting place of the Cliveden Set of the 1920s and 30s—a group of political intellectuals. Later, during the early 1960s when it was the home of the 3rd Viscount Astor, it became the setting for key events of the notorious Profumo affair. After the Astor family stopped living there, by the 1970s it was leased to Stanford University, which used it as an overseas campus. Today the house is leased to a company that runs it as a five-star hotel. The 375 acres (152 ha) gardens and woodlands are open to the public, together with parts of the house on certain days. Cliveden was one of the National Trust's most popular pay-for-entry visitor attractions, hosting 524,807 visitors in 2019.

Sol Studios (also known as The Mill or The Sol) is a recording studio located in Cookham, Berkshire, England. The recording studio and control room are part of the complex property, along an old watermill and residential wheelhouse in the countryside. The property was bought in 1974 by Gus Dudgeon, and the recording studio was built in the following year. Gus ran the studio as his own production facility until running into financial trouble when the studio was sold to Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page. Page decided to revert to the old name of "The Sol". HSH Music, a partnership of Rod Halling, Roy Shipston and Simon Holmes, purchased the studio from Page in 1988. They redeveloped it over the next two years into a commercial three-studio complex, utilising a quadruple garage on the site as Studio 2 and part of the old Mill Wheel housing as Studio 3. Chris Rea liked Studio 2 so much that he decided to block book it for a year at a time. In February 1994, HSH Music sold the site as a "residential" property. The new owners, however, failed to grasp that the building was built like a nuclear shelter and not really suitable for conversion. They subsequently sold it to Chris Rea, who owned it until 2006.

Cookham Lock is a lock with weirs situated on the River Thames near Cookham, Berkshire, about a half-mile downstream of Cookham Bridge. The lock is set in a lock cut which is one of four streams here and it is surrounded by woods. On one side is Sashes Island and on the other is Mill Island connected to Formosa Island, the largest on the non-tidal Thames. There are several weirs nearby. Hedsor weir was placed across the old navigation channel in 1837, seven years after the lock was opened. There is a lower weir, and Odney weir is on the channel next to Formosa Island. A short distance away from the lock is Odney, with the Odney Club situated on an ait. Navigation to the Odney Club by boat is possible, but is extremely difficult due to the shallow waters. It is thought that this is deliberate - to disallow non-members from entering the club site without paying the entrance fees.

Formosa Island is an island in the River Thames in England at Cookham Lock near Cookham, Berkshire, with two smaller adjacent islands. The island is one of the largest on the non-tidal river Thames with 50 acres (20 ha) of woodland. It can be reached by footbridge from Cookham. It is between two of the four channels in the river at Cookham, the one closest to Cookham was once the mill stream to a paper mill at Cookham. The one on the other side leads to Odney Weir. The adjacent Mill Island has the lock channel on the other side. Beyond the lock channel is Sashes Island and the channel furthest from Cookham is Hedsor Water, the original navigation channel, which was blocked by the weir in 1830 when the lock was opened, causing loss of trade to then owner Lord Boston.

Ray Mill Island is an island in the River Thames in England at Boulter's Lock near Maidenhead, Berkshire. It is immediately to the east of Boulter's Island, separated by the former millstream. The island is now a park administered by the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. It is named after the Ray family who once had a flour mill here. The mill was constructed in 1726 on the site of a previous mill, and continued to produce flour until the 1920s. Boulter's weir runs from the top end of the island across to the east bank near Taplow. A kayak flume has been built adjacent to the weir on the island. For over 20 years until it was stolen in October 2011, the island housed The Companion, a memorial statue for four local schoolboys who died in a skiing accident. A new version of the statue was unveiled in the original location in July 2012.

Taplow Bridge, sometimes called Taplow Footbridge, is a public footbridge over the River Thames between Maidenhead, Berkshire and Taplow, Buckinghamshire, England. It crosses the weir stream adjacent to Boulter's Lock, with the Berkshire bridgehead actually on Ray Mill Island. Pre-existing bridges provide access to Boulter's Island and hence to the mainland. The bridge was commissioned by Berkeley Homes, who were creating a residential development that occupied the former Taplow Paper Mills site at Glen Island on the Taplow bank of the river. The bridge gives access from that development to the complex of the lock and adjacent restaurant, as well as the Victorian pleasure gardens and a small cafe on Ray Mill Island. The bridge was designed by Knight Architects and the structural engineers were COWI. It opened to public use in 2018, with an official opening by Teresa May on the 2nd of November of that year. It won the Chilterns Buildings Design Awards in 2019. It has a single span, and a width of 35 metres (115 ft). It was fabricated off-site, and brought to site on a barge.

Taplow Court is a Victorian house in the village of Taplow in Buckinghamshire, England. Its origins are an Elizabethan manor house, remodelled in the early 17th century. In the 18th century the court was owned by the Earls of Orkney. In the 1850s, the court was sold to Charles Pascoe Grenfell, whose descendants retained ownership until after the Second World War. The court then served as a corporate headquarters for British Telecommunications Research (BTR) an independent research company set up in 1946. BTR was subsequently acquired by Plessey Electronics. In 1988 it was bought by the Buddhist foundation, Soka Gakkai International and serves as their UK headquarters. The court is a Grade II listed building, and its present appearance is due to a major rebuilding undertaken by William Burn for Charles Grenfell in 1855-1860. In the early 20th century, the court was home to William Grenfell and his wife Ettie. She was a noted Edwardian hostess, and Taplow Court became a gathering place for The Souls, a group of aristocratic intellectuals.

Boulter's Island is an island in the River Thames at Boulter's Lock, in the north-east suburbs of Maidenhead, Berkshire. It is next to the Maidenhead (west) bank, separated by the lock cut. Boulter's Island is accessible by motor vehicle via Boulter's Bridge across the tail of Boulter's Lock. The island has a number of private houses, a restaurant and a small boatyard with a slipway. Ray Mill Island lies alongside to the east and is a public park, separated from Boulter's Island by the Ray Mill Stream. Richard Dimbleby, the BBC broadcaster, lived for many years in a house on Boulter's Island.

Boulter's Lock is a lock and weir on the River Thames in England north-east of Maidenhead town centre, Berkshire. The present 1912-built lock replaces those at this point of the river to the immediate east dating from the late 16th century and that of 1772 built by the Thames Navigation Commission. The lock is on the western side of the north-south flowing reach between the A4094 Maidenhead to Cookham road and Ray Mill Island. The name is variably used for the immediate surrounding area. The weir is some way upstream of the lock, at the northern end of Ray Mill Island. It is one of the most popular whitewater freestyle kayaking areas on the River Thames, as it has been modified to allow kayakers to use it without causing disruption to other river users.

The Taplow Barrow is an early medieval burial mound in Taplow Court, an estate in the south-eastern English county of Buckinghamshire. Constructed in the seventh century, when the region was part of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, it contained the remains of a deceased individual and their grave goods, now mostly in the British Museum. It is often referred to in archaeology as the Taplow burial. The Taplow burial was made in what archaeologists call the "conversion period", during which the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were undergoing Christianisation. This period saw the erection of "Final Phase" burials: a select number of inhumations featuring lavish grave goods far richer than the graves of the preceding "migration period" (fifth and sixth centuries). The majority of these Final Phase burials were spatially separate from the new churchyard burials, although the Taplow Burial—which was likely placed next to an early church—is one of the few known exceptions. Located atop a hill, the area around it was previously an Iron Age hillfort and offers widespread views of the local landscape. Interred beneath the mound was a single individual—interpreted by archaeologists as a local chieftain—buried with a range of grave goods. These included military gear such as a sword, three spears, and two shields, as well as other items like drinking horns and glass beakers. Such elite items likely reflected the individual's aristocratic status. Several of these items were of probable Kentish manufacture, suggesting that the individual may have had links with the Kingdom of Kent. Little of the body survived, preventing osteoarchaeological analysis to determine their age or sex, although the content of the grave goods has led archaeologists to believe the individual was male. The mound was excavated in 1883 by three local antiquarians. At the time, it represented the most lavish Anglo-Saxon burial then known and remained so until the discovery of the ship burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk in the 1930s. At the request of the clergyman in charge of the churchyard, the grave goods recovered were donated to the British Museum, where many of them remain on display.

Nashdom, also known as Nashdom Abbey, is a former country house and former Anglican Benedictine abbey in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, England. Designed in Neo-Georgian style by architect Edwin Lutyens, it is a Grade II* listed building. It was converted into apartments in 1997. The gardens are Grade II listed in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.