Richmond: London's happy valley

Will Self
14.07.09

In what may well be one of the last Utilitarian bean-counting exercises performed by New Labour, the Department of Communities and Local Government has reported the results of its latest "Place Survey". This is a comprehensive look at how satisfied Britons are with where they live.

You and I might well imagine such activity should be confined to the Ministry of Stating the Bleeding Obvious but why make things easy when you can generate great mounds of paper and waste the time of a great many people and the money of a great many taxpayers to discover that, lo! The inhabitants of leafy Richmond upon Thames report an approval rating of 92.4 per cent.

This made Richmondians only the second happiest bunch in the country, beaten by the nabobs of the Square Mile but that hasn't stopped the Westside posse declaring victory, on the grounds that the 10,000 City of London residents are a statistically insignificant sample.

So, London boasts the most satisfied residents in the land but also, doh! the least: the inhabitants of two-stops-short-of-Dagenham (they're Barking), and Dagenham itself, have recorded a meagre 56.5 per cent approval rating for their own riverside manors; which may, it's fair to say, find themselves in the Thames, rather than upon it, if the world keeps getting hotter.

Being a Stockwell resident and while not exactly miserable, certainly not brimming over with the joys of life, I decided to go west for a day to find the secret of the Richmondians' inner peace.

Not that I've never been to Richmond before, like many of us I've strolled the meadows and copses of Richmond Park, and been captivated by the prospect from Richmond Hill over the misty meadows of Petersham.

"Heavens! What a goodly prospect spreads around," wrote James Thomson of this view in 1727, "of hills, and dales, and woods, and lawn and spires and glittering towns, and gilded streams."

To which he might add, were he around today: "And gasometers, and light-industrial premises, and in the blue distance Twickenham Stadium and Heathrow."

Let's not cavil. Richmond is definitely pretty, if you like that sort of thing. The elegant five-span Portland stone bridge (built in 1774) is the oldest river crossing in London, and who but a churl would complain about Quinlan Terry's Richmond Riverside, a sensitive re-imagining of the Georgian, in the form of a combined office, housing and commercial development immediately downstream? No less an eminence than the Prince of Wales described this as "an expression of harmony and proportion".

Sadly, I am a churl, and I've always thought the Riverside a ghastly bit of fakery, and to be frank, for years it had put me right off penetrating the environs of Richmond any further.

Until I detrained on Tuesday, after an effortless 15-minute ride in a beautifully air-conditioned carriage from Vauxhall, I was like unto Disraeli, who visited the town in 1849, and wrote: "I am enchanted with Richmond Green, which, strange to say, I don't recollect ever having visited before, often as I have been to Richmond. I should like to let my house and live there. It is still and sweet, charming alike in summer and winter."

In the interests of pursuing Dizzy's dream, I turned right out of the station, and confronted by a bog-standard London suburban high street, dominated by chain knicker stores, banks, and moderately fast food outlets, I swerved into the estate agent, Foxton's, to discover how much it would cost me to me to re-up to Richmond.

The receptionist was dead keen that I "sit down!" beneath an aggressively fauvist triptych of the burgh, and drink a blue bottle of mineral water while she fetched an agent.

Adam O'Leary turned out to be as smooth and neat as a pin, as befitted his calling. No, he said, the market in Richmond hadn't been too flat at all.

He couldn't compare it too much with elsewhere, because this was his patch, but while there had been some dip in prices at the end of '08, now he had more potential buyers than he could shake a SOLD sticker at.

He had the details for a nice, late-Edwardian detached house on Richmond Hill that, just about, would contain my numerous Victorian-terrace-dwelling offspring. It was on the market for a cool £2.25 million.

I took a long swig of the fizz. I thought Stockwell property was pricey enough but I'd need to find £1.5 million before the "goodly prospect" could be spread around me.

I thanked Adam and moved on. Right outside the shiny pseudo-coffee bar of Foxton's I ran into a very different Richmond denizen: Kenneth Dyer, 55, was emptying a roadside bin into his cart.

A road sweeper by trade, a Hounslow resident and a Bermudan by origin, Mr Dyer took a slightly more jaundiced view of the Richmond dream.

"I see the people coming towards me, and then they step right around. They don't treat everyone the same here. A few people stop and talk - the man in the radio shop will give me a coffee - but the majority look down on you."

Mr Dyer didn't exactly label this as out-and-out racism; besides, when I put it to him that it might be a double form of discrimination, against black people and road sweepers, he readily concurred: "Yet I tell them, it's in the Bible that some shall do this job, and others other jobs. It's a division of labour."

I didn't think the young drunk who now butted in on our chat was part of that division. He haled from Twickenham. "But I've been coming 'ere for years to hang out," he proclaimed.

"Now you see Oriel's over there," a wavering hand. "The Nazi superintendent police 'ave moved on all the homeless people who used to be there." Lest I get sucked into this jaundiced rodomontade I pressed on; after all, surely a place in which an RBS employee stood, unashamedly on the pavement having a fag and not fearing a lynching, couldn't be all bad?

I reached the never-before seen Green, and found it as lovely as Disraeli had said.

A broad expanse, fringed by trees, and surrounded by beautiful houses, some dating from the 17th century (and built by colleagues of Wren), others incorporated into the remains of Old Richmond Palace, which was extensively refurbished by Henry VII in the 1490s (without applying for planning permission).

Borne up by the sight of so many obviously contented yummy-mummies, disporting themselves on the lawn and suckling their offspring like heifers with trust funds, I approached a small herd (sorry, group), and asked them how they liked living Richmond.

They recoiled as if I'd tried to sell them crack, and one said primly: "I don't have time to talk, I have to look after these children."

In truth, her babies were fast asleep but I didn't want to press the point - I was looking a little feral, in shorts and beard, and presumably the Nazi superintendent police would be within rattling distance.

Instead, I went on across the green, past the Old Palace (where Disraeli had met Metternich), and just before the river managed to engage a prosperous looking gent who was garaging a BMW in conversation.

No, he didn't live here himself, only kept an office. No again, he wasn't surprised to learn how happy the Richmondians were. And what was his business? "Commercial property"; and how was it doing? "Bloody terrible!" He barked. "But see, I'm still smiling."

Along the riverbank the tourists were a-strolling, the boatmen were a-hiring, and the New Southern Belle, an incongruous reconstruction of a Mississippi river steamer, was just coming into dock beside Richmond Bridge.

I encountered the Nazi superintendent police in the form of PC Karin Ballantyne, who looked about as threatening as a 99 flake (considerably less threatening, given that the one I'd bought on the Green had cost me £2 - 25 per cent more than an inner-London cone). She concurred: there wasn't much trouble in Richmond, the stats said it all: if people got drunk in the riverside bars, they just got merry, not morose.

Simeon, who runs a smoothie stall immediately by the bridge, did seem a little morose initially. He shook his dreadlocks at me when I stopped at his counter and snapped: "Don't lean on it! It might break!" Once I'd explained who I was and requested a cup of fruit pulp, he warmed up: "Everybody in Richmond is nice," he said, "it's only when you visitors come that you spoil it."

I thought this churlish, even by my standards, but I suppose, having been a Richmond resident for 30 years, Simeon had his rights.

As to Mr Dyer's claims of racism: "They don't meet the people who actually live here - all these people," he threw an arm to encompass the trippers and the sitters, "they don't live here; Richmond's got nothing to do with the attitudes of the people."

Hm, maybe so, although when a few yards on I tried to engage a very obvious elderly Richmond resident in conversation (careful to show him my press pass and speak maximum proper) he shied away as if I were the Nazi superintendent police.

John and Lily Belcher, seated on folding chairs on the far side of the bridge were much more forthcoming.

A retired couple who lived in a Hounslow maisonette, they came over by bus to enjoy the open air.

Mr Belcher had been a Richmond devotee since he was a young man: "In those days we came for the coffee bars, to skate in the ice rink which was across the river there, and there was also the Palm Court dance hall, where the eBay offices are now. Yes, it was quite a lively place.'

As I headed up Richmond Hill, aiming for Thomson's immortal prospect, I noted the branches of Nando's and Gourmet Burger Kitchen, the Viva nightclub and the high Porsche count.

Bernardo O'Higgins, the Chilean liberator, had stayed some formative years in Richmond - there was a bust of him beside the river.

People now hailed Chile as "the England of South America" so perhaps the Richmond of his youth was his Utopian vision.

A meeting with a remarkably succinct gentleman near the top of the hill snapped me out of my reverie. Dapper in tan chinos and a blue shirt he consented to answer my questions anonymously. Richmond was, he said, a privileged place to live in, an expensive place.

The sense of community wasn't "too strong" but then again: "It's liberal, we have a Lib-Dem MP but in the last analysis it's basically a wealthy suburb, nothing more."

I taxed him with sounding cynical, and, in an echo of one of my earlier interviewees, he snapped: "Happy and cynical!" then strode away.

It was left to me to work my way back to the station. Past the Vineyard Burial Ground, where a notice demanded "NO ROUGH SLEEPERS" then liberally continued: "If you are homeless and need help call either" and listed a couple of agencies.

Past La Buvette, where I could have slurped chilled vichyssoise beneath its spreading awning.

I was beginning to get the Richmond vibe: happy, cynical, morose, expensive, steeped in history, liberal, with pockets of diversity - not so different from the rest of London.