Richmond Park

Where it sits. Richmond Park lies in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, about 15 kilometres south-west of central London, and is the largest of the Royal Parks — a walled expanse of acid grassland, bracken and ancient trees that feels less like a park than a piece of surviving countryside marooned inside the city. It is a National Nature Reserve, a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Special Area of Conservation, and is listed Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. Charles I created it as a deer park in the 17th century, walling in commons and farmland to the fury of local people, and the wall he built still encloses it. Richmond and Mortlake stations, and Richmond tube on the District line, are the usual approaches; the park has several gates, of which Richmond, Ham, Kingston, Roehampton and Pembroke Lodge are the most used.

The deer. Around 600 red and fallow deer roam free across the park and are the reason for most of its management rules. They have been here continuously since the 17th century, and they are wild animals, not livestock: the Royal Parks ask visitors to stay at least 50 metres away, and the distance matters most during the September–October rut, when stags bellow and clash, and again in June and July when does are birthing. Dogs must be under close control. The deer shape the landscape as much as any gardener — the browse line under the oaks, at exactly the height a deer can reach, is visible across the whole park. The ancient trees themselves are a national asset: hundreds of veteran oaks, some more than 700 years old, support rare invertebrate populations that depend on decaying heartwood.

Buildings and landmarks. White Lodge, Grade I listed and built as a royal hunting retreat, is now home to the Royal Ballet School. Pembroke Lodge, Grade II listed, was the home of the 19th-century prime minister Lord John Russell and later of his grandson, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who spent much of his childhood there; it is now a café and event venue with the best terrace view in the park. Behind it rises King Henry's Mound, listed by Historic England in 2020 and possibly a prehistoric round barrow, from which a telescope frames a protected sightline ten miles east to the dome of St Paul's Cathedral — a view legally shielded from new development. The Isabella Plantation, a 40-acre woodland garden begun in the 1830s and developed from the 1950s, is planted with evergreen azaleas, rhododendrons and camellias around streams and ponds; late April and early May are its peak. The park also has a golf club with two courses, and it played a role in both world wars and in the 1948 and 2012 Olympic Games.

On screen. Richmond Park has been used as a film location for seventy years, chiefly when a production needs open English country within an hour of a London studio. The Ealing comedy The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) ran a locomotive through the park and crashed it into a tree. In Performance (1968), James Fox crosses the park in a Rolls-Royce. Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), with Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold, used the landscape to evoke 16th-century Richmond — appropriately, since the Tudor palace stood just outside the wall. An Indian dust storm was staged here for Heat and Dust (1983). The Royal Ballet School at White Lodge appeared in Billy Elliot (2000). Guy Ritchie filmed parts of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) in the park with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law; scenes from Disney's Into the Woods (2014) with Meryl Streep were shot here, as were sequences for the comedy Patrick (2018). It is also a fixture of British television, from Blue Peter to Springwatch, and in 2018 was the subject of a nature documentary presented by David Attenborough and produced by the Friends of Richmond Park, which won the "Longform" prize at the national Charity Film Awards.

On the page and on canvas. Spencer Gore painted a series of Richmond Park landscapes in the last months of his life; the Tate curator Helena Bonett has noted that painting outdoors here through a cold, wet winter contributed to the pneumonia that killed him in 1914 at 35. Kenneth Armitage made oak-tree sculptures and drawings in the park between 1975 and 1986. In fiction, the Isabella Plantation is the setting for the picnic and the child's disappearance in Chris Cleave's The Other Hand.

Getting there and timing. From Richmond station it is about 25 minutes on foot up Richmond Hill to Richmond Gate, and the view from the hill on the way — the only view in England protected by its own Act of Parliament, passed in 1902 — is worth the climb by itself. A full perimeter walk is around 11 kilometres and takes three hours. Paths near the main gates and the Isabella Plantation are surfaced; most of the interior is rough grass and bracken. Vehicle gates open at dawn and close at dusk. Autumn mornings, when mist sits in the hollows and the stags are roaring, are the park at its most memorable.