Pubs with Rooms in Richmond and Kew

Richmond and Kew are the greenest of our London areas. Kew Gardens sits beside Kew Green, Richmond Park is a short way up the hill, and the Thames runs between them past Richmond’s riverside. Both are village-like centres with railway and Tube links to central London.

The Coach & Horses on Kew Green is the heritage choice: CAMRA describes an 18th-century coaching inn with Victorian expansion, extended again in 2000 to give 31 rooms, and it has been a Young’s house since 1831. The Orange Tree at the start of Richmond’s high street has 13 boutique rooms and is the easiest to reach, with the station opposite. The Red Cow on Sheen Road is the smallest: four en suite rooms above a pub with roots over 200 years old and a Victorian painted-glass bar-back that CAMRA rates among the oldest in London.

All three are real pubs first. The Young’s pubs take dogs in selected rooms for £25 a night; the Red Cow’s policy we haven’t found.

The big stories here are royal. Richmond Palace was a Tudor favourite and Elizabeth I died there in 1603, Charles I enclosed Richmond Park as a hunting ground in 1637, and George III’s family made Kew their country retreat, which is how Kew Palace and the gardens came to be. Plenty of lore has grown up around that, such as the tale that the Great Pagoda’s dragons were sold to pay the future George IV’s gambling debts, when Kew’s own account suggests the wooden dragons simply rotted. The pubs have more modest claims: the Orange Tree’s upstairs room really did launch a theatre in 1971, and the Coach & Horses sits on Kew Green where coaches once set down their travellers, though how old the building is depends on which source you read.