Royal Borough of Richmond upon Thames
Half of Richmond upon Thames is parkland. That fact takes a moment to land when you're standing in central London — but cross the river at Richmond Bridge, the oldest surviving span on the upper Thames, and you step into a borough where 630 red and fallow deer still move through a 2,360-acre royal deer park created by Charles I in 1634.
The borough runs along 21 miles of river frontage, threading together places that were once separate worlds: Kew with its botanical gardens on a former royal estate, Twickenham with its Georgian riverside houses, and Richmond itself, where Henry VII built a palace of such reported magnificence that he renamed the entire district after his Yorkshire earldom.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to work out a circuit: coffee near Richmond station, then up through the park to the Isabella Plantation in spring, down to Petersham for the river path, and across Richmond Bridge before the light drops. The bridge at dusk, Portland stone going gold, is the specific thing they mention.
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Book directly at the providerHow Royal Borough of Richmond upon Thames came to be
The place now called Richmond was known as Shene for centuries. Geoffrey Chaucer served at the manor in 1368, and Edward III, Henry V, and Elizabeth I all used the palace that stood here. Henry VII rebuilt it in the early 16th century, gave it his Yorkshire title — Richemount — in 1501, and left behind a name that stuck long after the palace itself crumbled to ruins.
The modern borough was assembled on 1 April 1965, when the old Surrey borough of Richmond and Barnes merged with Twickenham, which had been part of Middlesex. The boundary has shifted slightly since, most notably in 1994–1995 when sections of Richmond Park were transferred in from neighbouring boroughs.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summers are mild and the parkland comes into full colour from May through September — the best months for long walks and open-air stretches of river. Winters are grey and damp but rarely severe; the deer park has its own austere quality in November fog.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.