Twyford

Two Pubs, Two Temperaments

The Phoenix Inn has a hardwood nine-pin skittle alley you can hire, along with the food that goes with it: spit-roast half chicken and chips, haddock and spring-onion fishcakes, homemade beef chilli, Phoenix-style beef lasagne. The Mundy family has run the pub since 1981, when Reg and Anne took it on with their son Paul as chef. Paul took over in 1984 and kept it until he died in November 2019; his partner Emma now runs it with their youngest son, Tom. "Paul was a proper landlord and will never be forgotten," she wrote of him. Six to eight ales are usually on handpump, dogs are welcome inside and out, and there is a heated front patio and a grassed garden with a marquee for eating outside.

The Bugle Inn is the food-led alternative: a country inn with three en-suite bedrooms and menus that change daily. Its burgers alone run from a classic cheeseburger with house sauce to a blue cheeseburger with sweet bacon jam, a mushroom and Swiss burger with portobello and Emmental, buttermilk fried chicken with smoked-paprika mayonnaise, and a spicy bean burger with jalapeño mayonnaise and double cheese. The cask ales come from Bowman and Alfred's — Swift One and Wallops Wood, Winchester Pale Ale and Saxon Bronze. The meat is from Owton's at Chalcroft Farm, the buffalo from Laverstoke Park, the fish from a supplier named Tony at Premier Fish.

High Street Provisions and Flint-Walled History

For everything else there is the village store and Post Office on the High Street, in a building from the 1880s, run since 2022 by the Patel family.

St Mary the Virgin stands above the River Itchen. Alfred Waterhouse built the present church between 1875 and 1878, but he reused the bones of what stood before: late-twelfth-century round piers and carved capitals, a Purbeck marble font of the same age, fifteenth-century windows set into knapped flint walls banded with brick. Inside are painted barrel-vaulted roofs, eight bells, and a 1788 memorial to Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St Asaph, with a profile bust by Nollekens.

Where the Itchen Shaped the Village

From the church end of Church Lane a footpath drops to a bridge over the Itchen and into Twyford Meads, restored water meadows threaded with carriers, hatches, sluices and an old almost-circular lock. From around the seventeenth century until the 1930s, the meadows were worked by "drowners", who flooded the turf through a web of channels to warm the ground and win two hay crops a year. The longer Itchen Navigation Heritage Trail runs around ten mainly flat miles from Winchester to Woodmill, past water that holds brown trout, grayling, pike and eels.

Water has always been the point here. The Domesday surveyors recorded six mills and valued the two holdings together at forty-seven pounds; the navigation carried commercial traffic until 1869.

Steam Power and Rail Access

A mile from junction 11 of the M3 is Twyford Waterworks, built in stages between 1898 and 1935 and now a scheduled monument. On open days it runs a 1914 Hathorn Davey triple-expansion engine, five lime kilns, and the last complete set of Babcock & Wilcox water-tube boilers in the country; a two-foot-gauge railway and its weighbridge survive from when coal was hauled around the site. Stuart McLeod of the Heritage Lottery Fund called it "a rare 'time capsule' Edwardian waterworks". It still draws about five million gallons a day from its original boreholes, and there is a tea room, a picnic area and free parking.

Shawford station is about half a mile from the meads, reached on foot along the Itchen Way; Winchester and its cathedral are three miles north.

Open-Day Steam and Village Recreation

Hunter Park, the recreation ground opened in 1964, holds the cricket and football pitches, a playground, and two tennis courts built in 1991 with village fundraising and some grant aid. The bowls club has been going since 1901. On an open day at the waterworks, the restored engine and that same set of Babcock & Wilcox boilers are meant to be in steam.