THE inventor of the World Wide Web, who was knighted in the new year honours list, now lives in America, but still has special feelings for the area where he spent his childhood.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, whose ideas spawned the greatest communications revolution of the 20th century, grew up in East Sheen.

His parents were mathematicians and computer pioneers from Birmingham who met while developing the first commercially available computer, the Ferranti Mark 1. They settled in East Sheen, where Tim was born in 1955.

Of his early years, he remembers: "I felt I had inherited my parents' love of getting outside into the countryside. I never realised how lucky we were to live close to Richmond Park.

"There were no cars allowed after dark and you could walk up into the middle of it. And you see around you the orange glow of neon everywhere and you can see beyond the Crystal Palace.

"I felt that London was endless, but my little part of it was East Sheen. It was friendly, and now I go back and think what a nice part of town this is, especially with the park there and Sheen Common and other places to play."

At the age of four, he went to a one-room nursery class attached to a private girls' school across the road from home.

A year later, he transferred to Sheen Mount Primary School.

Sir Tim says he learnt to read by looking at road signs. In an interview with Computer World magazine, he says: "On the way up to the park, the street signs in London are black and white, have nice easy-to-read letters and are two feet off the ground. You can walk right up to them and run your fingers around the letters.

"Some of them would have little letters in red, like the name of a borough, or the postcode, SW14."

At Sheen Mount, Tim struck up a close friendship with fellow pupil Nicholas Barton and at playtimes the pair would "wander around the school and talk about scientific things".

He cites Nicholas as a great influence as he had a vast vocabulary for his age.

Sir Tim says: "He had a Junior World Encyclopaedia, 16 volumes, which he had read cover to cover. We did a lot of fun things together. We built a cart out of old pram wheels and took it around the park. And we made a lot of chemical experiments and wound electrical magnets while walking around the school playground."

Nicholas Barton later went into medicine and is now Professor of Genetics at Edinburgh.

On reaching the age of 11, Tim had the choice of going to the local Shene Grammar School or to Emmanuel in Wandsworth. His parents chose the latter because they "thought Emmanuel had slightly higher standards", but Sir Tim now questions this decision.

He said: "In retrospect, I think the social break of going to a school which was a train ride away instead of a walk away was quite a stress and I'm not sure it was merited. It meant that all my friends were based down the road, and I was halfway to the centre of London, which made it very difficult to meet up at weekends. It was quite a social impediment."

However, Tim excelled at school and was already hooked on science. He read physics at Queen's College, Oxford, and began building his own computers.

After graduating in 1976, he worked as a software engineer for various British companies, as well as two spells at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva.

He began thinking about making computers more user-friendly and developed a way of linking files so that clicking on a word connected the user to a further page.

The internet, the physical network of cables and computers around the globe, had existed since the late 1960s, but accessing it in those days involved sending a string of incomprehensible text to a distant server.

In 1989 Tim had the idea of making it accessible to ordinary folk, inventing cyberspace as we know it today. The concept was to treat the global network as if it were one giant information space.

He also wrote early browser software which gave the web the look we take for granted today.

Tim coined the name World Wide Web and the www prefix for pages - at the time, his wife reportedly laughed at this, pointing out that the abbreviation has more syllables than the full wording.

The web took a few years to build momentum but when it took off it changed the world of business and leisure forever.

In 1994 he founded the World Wide Web Consortium, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to maintain standards on the web and work on future developments. He is director of the consortium.

He has written a book about the past, present and future of the global network, entitled Weaving the Web, published in 1999.

However, Sir Tim is said to have made very little money out of his innovation. He has said that he dislikes the baggage of being famous.

He married Nancy Carlson, an American software analyst, in 1990, and they have two children. The family live in Boston.

His knighthood is the latest of dozens of awards and honours conferred on him. He already had an OBE and Time magazine had hailed him as one of the top 20 thinkers of the 20th century.

When the knighthood was announced, Sir Tim told the Press Association: "I'm very honoured, although it still feels strange.

"I feel like quite an ordinary person and so the good news is that it does happen to ordinary people who work on things that happen to work out, like the web.

"Links with Britain are very important to me. You always see Buckingham Palace through the railings. It's about as much of a shock to go through the railings as it is to go through the mirror like Alice in Wonderland."

Discussing the recent controversy about the honours system in general, Sir Tim remarked: "What's interesting about the British system is the way that modern values of democracy and transparency have been connected with ancient tradition, and attempts to keep that tradition and its roots alive.

"It's a good idea to review the process by which you make decisions, but not to change them too dramatically, but incrementally."

Considering his significant contribution to popularising electronic communications, it is perhaps ironic that he was notified of the knighthood by phone instead of through the internet or email. In contrast, the information for this article was gathered almost entirely by email and the internet.

Sir Tim added that it never occurred to him that his creation could lead to him receiving a knighthood.

He said: "We never really had time to sit back and wonder. So many things could have gone wrong that it might never have taken off, so we just spent all our time explaining how it could work, and persuading people that it would work."