The reality of being a Richmond resident: Celebrities may love it but, trust me, the parking’s awful, the school mums are catty – and the poshest cafe sells rusty junk for hundreds of pounds

I moved to Richmond in 2002 intending to stay for four years, and twenty-four years later I am still here – which tells you everything you need to know about Richmond and absolutely nothing positive about my ability to stick to a plan.

The area, TW9 and TW10, is year-on-year voted one of Britain’s happiest places to live, although whenever I read one of those surveys, I find myself wondering who exactly they asked… because happiness in Richmond tends to manifest itself through complaints about parking permits, aircraft noise and almost everyone else who lives here.

Richmond is one of those places that people can’t wait to tell you that they dislike… while simultaneously spending decades trying to move in.

Virginia Woolf, who founded the Hogarth Press here, famously once declared that between Richmond and death she chose death. That sounds dramatic… until you’ve spent twenty minutes trying to find a parking space near ‘idyllic’ Richmond Green on a Saturday afternoon.

Had the English author, who has a statue in her memory right on the riverbank, lived to witness the area’s current property prices – a four-bed can set you back millions – she might have concluded death also represented the better value option.

And don’t get me started on the helicopter parenting that takes place within this postcode – it’s almost as difficult to bear as the roar of the jumbo jets that thunder over the town every two minutes en route to Heathrow.

When my son attended the town’s Vineyard School, I wrote The Playground Mafia, a bestselling novel about competitive mothers and school gate politics.

Later, I discovered that parents were buying copies from Waterstones, hiding them inside brown paper bags and reading them secretly on park benches to determine whether they appeared in the novel. They didn’t, although the types certainly did.

Over the decades, Richmond has become one of those rare places where residents aspire to a pared-down lifestyle – and are prepared to spend extraordinary sums of money achieving it.

Nowhere illustrates that better than Petersham Nurseries, aka the country’s poshest garden centre, which is magically capable of persuading otherwise rational adults that £250 represents a sensible amount to spend on a rusty old garden chair.

The 600 or so deer (I haven’t counted them) that roam Richmond Park, Henry VIII’s spectacular former hunting ground, continue to exercise considerably better judgement than many of the humans sharing their space.

My affection for the deer stems partly from their beauty and partly from their habit of charging at luxury SUVs, an activity that feels less like wildlife behaviour and more like social commentary.

During autumn, when the stags begin rutting and the mists are rising, the sound carries across the park like something from a prehistoric battlefield, reducing even the most enthusiastic cockerpoo owners to nervous spectators.

Those who move out, desperate for larger houses, more countryside and supposedly simpler lives eventually discover they saw more wildlife roaming Richmond Park than they do from their actual country homes. 

Celebrity spotting remains strangely normal and when I first moved here, I wandered into a picture framing shop and found myself standing next to Sir David Attenborough, Dawn French and Mick Jagger, making it feel less like shopping and more like accidentally walking into Madame Tussauds.

Sir David still lives at the top of the hill and, in my view, should eventually be granted sainthood as the patron saint of Richmond Park.

Richard E Grant can regularly be spotted using local buses with a level of enthusiasm that suggests public transport is considerably more glamorous than many Richmond residents assume.

American visitors in search of everything Ted Lasso swarm like bees to Richmond Green every day, descending upon the famous pub corner in such numbers that my hairdresser at salon Art8 regularly informs them I produced the series, resulting in me posing for photographs with complete strangers while attempting to have my roots done.

Across the Green, cricket still appears whenever the sun shines, the annual May Fair survives against all odds, and New Year’s Eve sees locals gathering on Richmond Hill with prosecco, cocktails poured from cans and a bagpiper whose relationship with Scotland remains gloriously uncertain, celebrating beneath the houses once occupied by Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall while gazing across a view so beautiful that even the most hardened Richmond cynic falls silent for a few moments.

It’s a panorama, protected by Parliament and immortalised in art by Turner, that still leaves me staring in disbelief despite having seen it thousands of times and I’d argue it remains one of the few views in Britain that’s capable of stopping people mid conversation.

The area’s cultural heritage is considerably richer than most people realise. 

Opposite Richmond Station, where commuters now gather in All Bar One, stood the legendary Crawdaddy Club, where The Rolling Stones established their first residency before handing over to The Yardbirds and Eric Clapton.

The literary connections are equally strong. Virginia and Leonard Woolf once lived just off the main high street, while Hollyhock Café overlooking the Thames remains one of London’s great unofficial writers’ rooms.

Books On The Rise hosts excellent talks and poetry events, The Open Book champions local authors and The Alligator’s Mouth continues to prove that books remain cheaper than therapy.

The closure of Whole Foods several years ago caused a level of local anguish normally associated with constitutional crises, despite the area containing enough yoga instructors, nutritional therapists and wellness coaches to keep the business afloat through kale consumption alone.

Pools on the Park, Bhuti, Elevate and BARCH mean there is now almost nowhere to hide from wellbeing.

The high street in 2026 presents a more mixed picture, because excellent coffee, expensive chocolate, artisan bakeries and premium ice cream flourish while useful shops quietly disappear, making it easier to acquire a life coach than a pair of knickers.

Yet despite the traffic, the parking permits, the aircraft noise, the disappearing retail shops and the occasional outbreaks of competitive parenting, there remains something undeniably compelling about a place where countryside, city, village, status symbol and community somehow occupy the same few square miles.

What makes Richmond uniquely Richmond is that it manages to combine intellectual aspiration with mild absurdity; the avocados have usually sold out in Waitrose by lunchtime, the electric bikes multiply faster than rabbits, and every other year generous residents open their gardens to the rest of us so we can admire swimming pools, architectural ambition and topiary that appears to have been shaped by someone with both a trust fund and too much time on their hands, and I genuinely love every minute of it.

This is a town where Midsomer Murders sells out at Richmond Theatre, but so does Prima Facie, where the same audience that applauds Jodie Comer can discuss composting techniques over a flat white, and where an unusually high percentage of the population seem capable of quoting Virginia Woolf while overtaking you silently on an electric bike.

The intelligentsia on two wheels deserve a better high street than the one they currently have, because if any town merits a small V&A, a proper museum celebrating The Rolling Stones, Cream and Richmond’s extraordinary musical heritage, alongside a permanent home for Woolf and the borough’s literary history, it is surely this one.

I arrived planning to stay for four years and twenty-four years later remain exactly where I started, which is perhaps the strongest recommendation I can offer for a place that continually frustrates, surprises, entertains and occasionally infuriates me, while somehow remaining one of the few places in Britain that genuinely deserves its reputation for happiness.