RIVER LANE, PETERSHAM.
Another hopeless fight against overpoweringly adverse conditions ended here in 1907, when the famous Star and Garter Hotel on Richmond Hill was closed. We who make Petersham our home know well that the “Star and Garter” is closed, if only for the reason that, it being situated in the parish, the loss to the local rates incidental to the closing meant a sudden rise of ninepence in the pound. We are thus hoping, without in the least expecting it, that some greatly daring person or corporation will be good enough to take and open it again. This increased demand, added to the hungry re-assessments recently made, and to the other increases, caused by the extravagant proceedings of the Richmond Corporation, which would appear to carry on the business of the town on behalf of the tradesmen instead of the residents, is rendering the neighbourhood an increasingly costly one to live in. Every one would now seem to share the fallacious belief that to live in Richmond one must necessarily be rich. True, one will presently need to be if things continue on the lines of recent developments.
Meanwhile, will no one take the poor old “Star and Garter”? It really seems as if no one would, for at least two unsuccessful attempts have been made to dispose of it at auction. The property was stated by the auctioneer to have cost £140,000. He described it in a phrase which sounds like a quotation, as “a far-famed hostelry, a palace of pleasure on a hill of delight.” He also declared the view from it to be “the finest prospect in England, perhaps in the world.” But he was not prepared, it seems, to assure the purchaser of a much finer prospect still: that of a dividend from the purchase, and so the result was a bid of only £20,000. The second attempted sale resulted in no bid being made at all.
The “Star and Garter” was ever noted for its high charges, framed to match its lofty situation and the exalted station of many of the guests who of old patronised it. Louis Philippe, King of the French, and Queen Amélie resided there for months at a time, and were frequently visited by Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort. The unhappy Napoleon the Third, the ill-starred Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, the equally ill-fated Prince Imperial, and other crowned, or prospectively crowned, heads were the merest every-day frequenters; but the “Star and Garter” long since discovered that there were not enough crowned heads to go round. Nor did the enterprising Christopher Crean, sometime cook to the old Duke of York, who took it and re-opened it after an old-time disastrous interval of five years, in 1809, find that he could secure constant relays of visitors to pay him, as some were stated to have done, half a guinea for the mere privilege of looking out from the windows upon the beauties of the Thames Valley.
It would seem, in conclusion, that the coming of motor-cars has finally rendered the huge “Star and Garter” impossible. Time was when the drive to Richmond was a delightful and leisurely affair, occupying in the coming and the going a considerable part of the day. Motor-cars and taxicabs have rendered it a matter of minutes only, and those who used to lunch or dine at Richmond now do the like, just as luxuriously, and almost as quickly by modern methods of travel, at Brighton, Hastings, or Eastbourne.
I have written much elsewhere of Petersham, in a little book called Rural Nooks round London, and so will now leave the subject for the last Thames-side nooks that can by any means claim to preserve to this day any relics of their old village life. The first of these is Isleworth, in Middlesex.