Five Centuries of Leisure Around Hampton Court
For many Teddington residents, Hampton Court is simply part of the scenery, a backdrop to dog walks in Bushy Park and the odd trip to the Maze with visiting relatives. Yet people have come to this bend of the Thames in search of a good time for more than 500 years. What they did there, and what they spent their money on, has changed a great deal. This is a short history of leisure on Teddington’s doorstep, along with the places where traces of each era still survive.
A Tudor pleasure palace
It started with Cardinal Wolsey. In the early 1500s he set about turning a fairly ordinary country house into something far grander, and when he fell out of favour in 1529 Henry VIII took the place for himself. Henry was not one for sitting still. Bushy Park and the land around the palace became deer parks for hunting, and in 1537 a walled tiltyard went in for jousting. Five towers looked over it. They were really posh banqueting houses, and one survives (much altered) as part of the Tiltyard Café.
His real obsession, though, was tennis. Not the Wimbledon kind. Lawn tennis only arrived in the 1870s, whereas Henry played real tennis, an indoor game where the ball comes off the walls and sloping roofs. Wolsey had a court built between 1526 and 1529 and the young king spent hours in it. The one standing today went up on the same spot for Charles I in 1625, and the Royal Tennis Court club still plays there. Few sports venues anywhere are pushing 400 years old.
Then there was the gambling. Henry’s privy purse accounts for 1529 to 1532 record his losses at dice, cards and bowls. In late 1532 he even lost money to Anne Boleyn and two courtiers at a card game called Pope Julius, a detail that sounds almost too good to be true. Wealthy Britons never really lost their taste for a wager, and fresh games crossed the Channel every so often. Roulette is one of them. It grew up in France during the 1700s, with a wheel described at the Palais Royal in Paris as early as 1796. Today’s single-zero version, the wheel behind most roulette games found across Europe, came later. The brothers François and Louis Blanc brought it in at Bad Homburg in the 1840s.
Wagers on the Hurst
Over the river, things got rowdier. Moulsey Hurst is one of the oldest sporting grounds in England, and through the 1700s and early 1800s it hosted cricket, prizefights and horse racing, often with money riding on the outcome. The Prince of Wales had 100 guineas on a single cricket match there in 1733. By the mid-1800s the Hampton Races on the Hurst were estimated to draw more than 100,000 people a day, plenty of them crossing on the ferry. The racecourse later became Hurst Park, which closed in 1962.
William III and Mary II had gentler tastes. Around 1690 their gardeners, George London and Henry Wise, planted the Maze. It was hornbeam to begin with and yew later on, and it is now the oldest surviving hedge maze in the UK. Getting lost in it has long been part of the fun. In Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889), Harris swears it is easy, gets thoroughly lost and has to be helped out by a keeper.
The Victorian day-trippers arrive
The big change arrived in 1838. Queen Victoria opened the palace to the public that year, and the crowds came quickly, roughly 116,000 in 1839 alone. By 1850 annual numbers had passed 200,000. According to Historic Royal Palaces, the Maze was a hit almost straight away. Then the railway arrived in 1849. Once the Bank Holidays Act of 1871 came in, bank holidays were the palace’s busiest days, and tea rooms popped up nearby to cater for everyone.
Bushy Park turned into a day out of its own. Wren designed its mile-long Chestnut Avenue as a grand approach to the palace, running from Teddington to the Lion Gate, with the Diana Fountain in the middle since 1713. From the 19th century Londoners came out every May for Chestnut Sunday to picnic under the blossom. The tradition has had its gaps, but the Friends of Bushy and Home Parks brought it back in 2024. One more local claim to fame: the London Museum credits Teddington Cricket Club with the first formal hockey match, played in Bushy Park in 1871.
Leisure today
Bushy Park’s best-known modern export started small. Paul Sinton-Hewitt, injured and unable to run himself, organised a free timed 5k in the park on 2 October 2004. Thirteen runners came along to what was then known as the Bushy Park Time Trial. It grew into parkrun, now held in more than 20 countries, and junior parkrun began in Bushy Park in 2013. Every Saturday morning, Henry’s old hunting ground fills with runners, walkers and volunteers.
The older traditions haven’t gone anywhere. Real tennis is still played at the palace, and Historic Royal Palaces has staged summer jousting tournaments there. There’s also the annual Hampton Court Palace Food Festival, which Henry would surely have approved of. The RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival moved to Badminton for 2026 but is due back in 2027. And the red and fallow deer are still roaming Bushy Park.
Five centuries in one walk
Most of this history can be seen in a single afternoon. A walk from Teddington Gate down Chestnut Avenue passes the Diana Fountain before reaching Hampton Court Road and the palace’s Lion Gate. From there it is a short stroll to the Maze, and the Tiltyard Café, next to Henry’s last surviving tower, makes a fitting place to finish with a cup of tea.
Five hundred years on, this corner of south-west London is still where people come to play.