Place Name
Named after Halford House which was built in 1710 on former agricultural land called Church Shot. John Halford, was a wealthy vintner and owner of the Mortlake brewer turned hotelier who made the Castle Richmond’s leading hotel. Tradition has it that he purchased the property, originally called Vineyard House, in 1776. However, research by The Vineyard website says that in fact he was the copyholder of two adjoining plots of land. It was his son Carteret John Halford (his unusual first name is of Norman origin) (1752 – 1837), a churchwarden of the parish church and member of the Vestry who bought the house itself, having disposed of the hotel soon after his father’s death. Carteret is listed in Evans’ Richmond and Vicinity directory as resident in Vineyard House in 1825 (the first family reference to the house itself). Following his death the property passed down the family line before being sold in the 1850s to an Albert Dixon who commissioned the architect F Brewer to plan and assign a new road (Halford Road). By now the house had changed name. Even with the plans, a large extension was built in 1880. The road itself was laid out over its gardens between 1881 and 1886, as John Cloake in the Growth of Richmond explains: “With the opening of Kew Gardens station, the fields on the east of Kew Road were also developed with new roads and houses. Within 25 years of the first coming of the railway, half the fields of Richmond had already been built over. Before the end of the century they had been completely submerged under lines of detached or semi-detached villas or rows of smaller cottages. As the supply of land in the fields dried up, many of the large grounds attached to the big old mansions were redeveloped with roads which still bore the old names: Halford Road, Ellerker Gardens, the Hermitage, Mount Ararat, and so on.”
