Tag: richmond

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Henry VII, Ted Lasso, and the Richmond greyhounds

Henry Tudor, had a pretty tenuous claim on the English throne. His mother, Margaret Beaufort, was a great granddaughter of John of Gaunt (third son of Edward III), so he had only a smidgin of royal blood in his veins, but this was enough to make him the leading candidate for the crown for the House of Lancaster in the late 1400s.

Because we’re in the century of the Wars of the Roses, the country riven by conflict and the throne passing from Yorkists (white rose) to Lancastrians (red) and back again. 

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Richmond’s Blue Plaques

After last month’s stroll past some of the more prominent plaques in Putney, another piece, this time on the residents of Richmond upon Thames. This should appear in April’s The Richmond Magazine.

Given its size and history, the town of Richmond has surprisingly few ‘official’ English Heritage blue plaques, those roundels that commemorate where a famous person once lived or worked. And there isn’t a body – such as the Wandsworth or Putney societies – that puts up is own memorials, so the town seems a little bashful about its historic residents.

But perhaps what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality. In Paradise Road, for example, a plaque shows where Leonard and Virginia Woolf founded the Hogarth Press. Mainly associated with Bloomsbury, the Woolfs lived in Richmond between 1917 and 1924 and while there Virginia published various stories and her novel ‘Jacob’s Room’. Not too far away on Richmond Hill a plaque marks where the actor Celia Johnson – star of Brief Encounter among many other 1940s and 50s films – was born.

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