Hustings for the 2024 General Election organised by The Richmond Society took place on Monday 24 June at Duke Street Church, Richmond and simultaneously on Zoom.
After opening statements from each candidate they responded firstly to pre-submitted questions and then to questions from the audience before giving their closing statements.
A video of the entire event is available on YouTube.
The published list of candidates for the Richmond Park constituency:
CORYTON, Laura (Labour Party) FRENCH, Chris (The Mitre TW9) GEZDARI, Sara (Conservative Party) HARRISON, Richard (Social Democratic Party) HEARN, Michael (Reform UK) OLNEY, Sarah (Liberal Democrats) WARLOW, Chas (Green)
Richmond Society members and guests gathered at The Poppy Factory on Thursday 19 May to explore the new visitor centre and hear the story of the charity in its centenary year.
Barry May, Chairman, said: “There is so much history bound up in the place. The Poppy Factory is such an inspirational gem at the heart of Richmond, doing such fabulous work. It deserves to be better known and visited by all who live here.”
The Poppy Factory moved to Richmond in 1926 from Old Kent Road, where it had opened four years earlier. A rapidly expanding workforce of wounded and injured veterans needed bigger premises. Flats were built on site for the workers and their families and within a few years, a thriving community had been established.
Since then, The Poppy Factory has developed into a national charity. All funds raised through the visitor centre are used to help veterans with health conditions move towards all kinds of employment, across England and Wales.
Join a Richmond Society visit to The Poppy Factory
in its centenary year
The Poppy Factory, founded to provide work for wounded First World War veterans, is celebrating its centenary throughout the year.
It was set up in a former collar factory on the Old Kent Road in London in 1922 and made a million poppies within two months. As demand increased, in 1926 the factory moved to a disused brewery in Petersham Road, Richmond. Housing for the workforce and their families was built on adjacent land and in 1932 the present factory was built.
To mark 100 years of the factory, The Richmond Society is organising a guided tour at 10:30 am on Thursday 19 May. Places are limited and can be secured for £12 each, all proceeds going to the Poppy Factory.
Andrew Humphreys, author of Raving upon Thames, a new book about Richmond’s role at the heart of Sixties London from Carnaby Street to the King’s Road and Richmond upon Thames, spoke about the music-led youth revolution that launched the careers of the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and more. What happened here changed the course of Britain’s musical history.
Richard Deverell, Director of Kew Gardens, spoke to The Richmond Society on Thursday 17th June 2021 about the Kew Gardens Strategy that was published earlier this year.
Richard is the fifteenth Director of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He has devoted his career to leading innovative and ambitious improvements to public engagement and education. For example, at the BBC he revamped the Children’s BBC channel with a mission to raise the quality of programming for children, introducing new content that would educate and engage them.
Since joining Kew, he has led the refresh of Kew’s strategy, bringing expertise from Kew’s global science into sharper focus and more actively engaging the public with contemporary science and conservation in Kew’s beautiful historic gardens.
He is a passionate advocate for the power of plants and fungi to help solve the critical challenges facing humanity in the 21st Century. He is also an official Champion for Food Forever, a global initiative that aims to secure biodiversity for the benefit of food security around the world.
You can read about the March 2021 Kew Gardens Strategy at this link.
Manoj Badale OBE, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and owner of the Rajasthan Royals, spoke to The Richmond Society on Thursday 13th May 2021 about how the business of sport, and cricket in particular, is changing.
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More information about the speaker:
Manoj Badale was born in Dhule, Maharashtra, India, but grew up in the UK. He studied economics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University.
Since 1998, he has been the co-founder of over forty businesses, largely technology related, all set up with his business partner Charles Mindenhall, which they manage through their venture building group – Blenheim Chalcot.
In 2013, Manoj led the Further Education Learning Technology Action Group (FELTAG) for Rt Hon Matthew Hancock, when in position of Skills and Enterprises Minister. More recently, Manoj was recently appointed to the NHS Health Tech Advisory Board.
Manoj is heavily involved in charitable activities and is the founding trustee and chairman of the British Asian Trust and was also the chairman of Operation Smile UK until 2014. He was also a founding trustee of the charity Technology Trust. In June 2018, Manoj was awarded an OBE for services to the economy and charity.
Manoj has recently co-authored a book on the business of sport, A New Innings. Copies can be purchased here with all proceeds going to the British Asian Trust Covid Appeal.
Dominic Palacio, Head of Community at Richmond Rugby, spoke to The Richmond Society on Thursday 15th April 2021 about the extensive work of Richmond Rugby in the community, particularly during the pandemic.
Dominic writes:
Richmond Rugby Community department, at its basic level is to promote and encourage the participation of rugby in local borough schools and we now deliver weekly rugby coaching in over 20 schools. Since the Covid pandemic hit we have had major restrictions delivering our normal work, so we decided to focus our resources helping those most in need in our local community.
Each school holiday we have cooked and delivered a nutritional meal to vulnerable children – averaging over 60 meals per day, we even cooked and delivered a Christmas meal for entire families on Christmas Day. We have a team of nearly 20 local volunteers who help us with the daily deliveries.
When schools were shut again by government in early January we focussed our effort in receiving and then refurbishing second hand laptops and tablets from local people every Saturday throughout January. To date we have had donated over 800 devices, and over 200 of which have been professionally wiped and refurbished and distributed to over 23 local schools.
Our other work extends to running a Rugby Rehabilitation programme for young men aged 15 – 18 years of age in HMP Feltham Youth Offenders Institute. And a joint partnership with the Met Police and the MCC foundation running a crime prevent programme – using sport as the platform to help educate children in deprived areas of the risks of gangs and criminal activity.
Sir Peter Hendy, Chair of Network Rail, spoke to The Richmond Society on Thursday 18 March 2021 about his wide ranging and continuing experience in public transport in London and the rest of the country.
Sir Peter Hendy CBE, is arguably Britain’s foremost public transport expert. He is Chair of Network Rail, and was previously Commissioner of Transport for London for nearly ten years. He is also Chair of the London Legacy Development Corporation which is developing the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. In addition, he recently published his interim report into the connectivity of the four nations of the United Kingdom, a task commissioned directly by the Prime Minister.
Sir Peter lives in Richmond and is a member of our Society. He started his career in 1975 as a London Transport graduate trainee. He is a trustee of London’s Transport Museum and of the Science Museum Group. He was knighted for services to transport and the community in 2013 following the successful operation of transport during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, having been made CBE in 2006 after the London bombings of 2005.
Inevitably our planned series of Summer Season Heritage Walks, our forty-first series, scheduled for alternate Wednesday evenings through May, June and July had to be postponed due to Government restrictions on public gatherings from March onwards.
However, with a sense of optimism and mindful of the need to implement necessary social distancing and other measures, we planned a series of three walks on alternate Wednesday evenings through September under the titles ‘Celebrating Richmond Bridge and Riverside’, ‘Celebrating The Terrace Gardens and The Hill’ and ‘Celebrating The Green and Richmond Palace’ – each limited to twenty, pre-booked places.
Much to our surprise and delight, the three, planned walks were vastly oversubscribed, and led to our doubling each of the walks, planning a series of six walks between 2nd September and 7th October. Our walks along the riverside between Old Palace Lane and Petersham Meadows on the evenings of the 2nd and 9th September were most successful, saving for the now inevitable conflicts with the ever increasing number of cyclists using the towing path between Water Lane and the Meadows, even in the early evenings. In accordance with long-established custom, each walk finished with an adjournment to the spacious Rose of York on the Petersham Road and lively conversation until closing time.
Very sadly however, the coming into effect of the Government’s more restrictive Regulations on Monday 14th September, two days before our third scheduled walk; their lack of clarity and lack of consistency with the official Guidance only published the previous Friday; and the Committee’s concern not to place members at undue risk, led to our having to disappoint the eighty or more members who had booked for the last four walks in the series by bringing the series to a premature end.
We very much hope that by next summer we will be able to reinstate the summer series of walks free of the increasingly complex and ambiguous restrictions under which we presently live.
