Loading...
Loading...
Henry VII renamed an entire town after himself and built one of Tudor England's great palaces here. The palace is almost entirely gone, but the deer his successors stocked the park with are still roaming free, centuries later.
Richmond, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, sits on a graceful bend of the River Thames southwest of central London, and its very name is a direct piece of royal branding. Before 1500, the settlement here was known as Sheen, grown up around an older royal manor. That year, Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty, ordered the town renamed "Richmond," after the earldom he had held before winning the throne from Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Few English towns can point to quite such a direct, deliberate act of royal renaming behind their modern name.
Most towns earn their names slowly, worn smooth by centuries of local use. Richmond got its name in a single royal command, and never gave it back.
The old royal palace of Sheen had burned down in 1497, and Henry VII used the opportunity to build something grander in its place: Richmond Palace, constructed at the very beginning of the 16th century on the site between what's now Richmond Green and the river. It was, by any measure, a statement building, intended to announce the Tudor dynasty's permanence and prestige after decades of civil war had left the English throne anything but secure. Henry VII himself died at the palace in 1509, a fittingly significant end for the man who had built it as a monument to his own new royal line.
The palace remained a favourite royal residence for generations afterward. Queen Elizabeth I held court here regularly and was known to love hunting stags in the surrounding deer park, a pursuit that would shape the district's landscape in ways still visible today. It's a genuinely evocative thought: the same green expanses that Richmond's modern residents walk through on a Sunday afternoon were once Elizabeth I's personal hunting grounds.
Richmond Palace's fortunes collapsed along with the monarchy itself. When Parliament overthrew the Crown in the mid-17th century, the palace was sold off and substantially demolished, its materials stripped and sold rather than preserved. Today, remarkably, the only part of Henry VII's original Tudor masterpiece still standing is the gateway, a modest but genuinely poignant survivor of what was once one of the grandest royal residences in England.
What the Tudor monarchs left behind, even after the palace itself was gone, was the deer park. In 1625, Charles I brought his court to nearby Richmond Palace specifically to escape the plague sweeping through London, and turned the surrounding landscape into a formal hunting park stocked with red and fallow deer. In 1637, he went further still, building a brick wall eight miles long to enclose the park, keeping his deer in and, rather more pointedly, local residents out.
That same enclosed landscape survives today as Richmond Park, the largest of London's Royal Parks and a site of genuine national and international importance for wildlife conservation. It remains a designated National Nature Reserve, and its deer population, descended from those Charles I introduced nearly four centuries ago, still roams freely across the park, over 630 red and fallow deer that have called this ground home since 1637.
Richmond Park's most famous vantage point, King Henry's Mound, offers a protected sightline all the way to St Paul's Cathedral, over ten miles away, a view considered so significant it's actually protected by planning law, preventing any new development anywhere along that line of sight from ever interrupting it. It's a genuinely rare thing for a single view to carry that kind of legal weight.
Richmond Hill's other great landmark building had nothing to do with royalty at all, at least not directly. The Star and Garter began life modestly, as an 18th-century inn built in 1738, before growing into a grand Victorian hotel overlooking the Thames Valley. Its purpose changed entirely in 1915, when the British Red Cross Society bought the site to accommodate severely disabled soldiers returning from the First World War. What became the Royal Star and Garter Home, constructed between 1921 and 1924 to a design by Sir Edwin Cooper, provided accommodation and nursing care for 180 seriously injured servicemen, a genuinely moving piece of social history layered on top of an already long-running building. The site is private residences today, though its striking exterior can still be viewed from Richmond Hill.
Beyond the park and the palace ruins, Richmond's riverside itself remains one of the most genuinely pleasant stretches of the Thames anywhere in London: Georgian terraces, riverside pubs, and towpaths that draw walkers, rowers, and picnickers in equal measure. The town centre around Richmond Green retains a village-like quality that has made it one of southwest London's consistently most desirable addresses for centuries.
Richmond's cultural life extends well beyond its royal history. Richmond Theatre, a handsome late-Victorian playhouse, has hosted touring productions for well over a century, giving the town a genuine cultural anchor to match its historical one, and proof that Richmond's identity was never solely about what the Tudors left behind.
Richmond's whole story is really a study in what survives and what doesn't. The palace that gave the town its name is almost entirely gone, reduced to a single gatehouse. But the deer park built around it, and the deer themselves, have outlasted the Tudor dynasty, the Stuart monarchy, and everything that's happened since. Walk from the surviving gateway to the open expanses of Richmond Park, and you'll be tracing the two very different fates of one royal ambition.
The Social Martini is proud to connect the people who live, work, and explore Richmond. 🍸