Place Name
Like nearby Park Hill this is named after its proximity to Richmond Park, Charles I’s hunting grounds for red and fallow deer that he created in 1625. Built on land belonging to Sir Thomas Newby Reeve, a member of the Vestry, a prototype parish council, it was laid out to link Friars Stile Road with Queen’s Road, in 1846. Its housing which was built for the working and artisan classes, dates from about the same time. John Cloake in The Development of Richmond writes: “Richmond had already begun to grow in the early 19th century. Much of the new development at the time was a thickening-up of areas in the existing town. But ‘New Richmond’ was developed in the field along the Lower Mortlake Road in the 1820s with small houses for the artisan and lower working class. Then in the 1840s came new developments in the Upper Field: a row of villas in Friars Stile Road, the development of Park Road, and new large villas on the west side of Queen’s Road.”
