Today, on his 100th birthday, we find ourselves thinking not about where Sir David Attenborough has been, although that list is obviously extraordinary, but about where he always comes back to. Over the course of a career spanning more than seven decades, he has reshaped the way we see the natural world through landmark series including The Blue Planet and Planet Earth. He brought the deep ocean and its astonishing life into living rooms for the first time, like the elaborate courtship of birds of paradise, or the now-iconic iguana outrunning snakes on the Galapagos. Over time, his work evolved from documenting the wonder of nature to reframing it as fragile, which is undoubtedly his greatest legacy.
As extraordinary as his influence has been on our understanding of the planet we all live on, there is something quietly compelling about turning the lens on the man himself – and, specifically, the small corner of London he has chosen to live in. But before Richmond, there was Leicester.
Born in Isleworth, raised in Leicester
Sir David Frederick Attenborough was born on 8 May 1926 in Isleworth, Middlesex, just across the river from the Richmond neighbourhood he would later make his permanent home. He didn’t stay long. When he was five, his father Frederick accepted the position of principal of University College in Leicester, and the family relocated to College House on the university campus – an environment rich in intellectual curiosity and, during the Second World War, quiet compassion: the family took in two Jewish refugee girls through a humanitarian programme, giving them a home for seven years.
A young Attenborough was already conducting his own fieldwork, collecting fossils, stones and specimens, and spent time exploring the Leicestershire countryside. Of that period, he has spoken about how Leicester shaped his early years. “The memories of Abbey Park and the River Soar are inseparable from my childhood. It was there that I discovered and began to understand fossils, with the limestone quarries a hunting ground for exploration of what lay just beneath the surface of the soil."
After Leicester, he followed a path that was, on the surface, fairly conventional: Clare College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences, followed by National Service in the Royal Navy, stationed in North Wales and the Firth of Forth. Only after this did things take their defining turn, when he joined the BBC in the early 1950s as a trainee producer. He was 25. And he had just moved to Richmond.
Richmond for a lifetime
Attenborough has lived in the same house in Richmond Upon Thames since 1952, when he and his wife Jane bought a property situated between the former Mayfield Cottages and a pub called the Hole in the Wall. He has never left. In an interview with Time Out in 2013, he was unambiguous about why: “Partly because I live there, partly because my friends and family are there. The climate suits me; it's got access to some of the finest civilised facilities in the world. And London has the greatest serious music that you can hear any day of the week in the world.”
Elsewhere, speaking to Discover Britain, he described it with characteristic precision: "Richmond is a beautiful pocket of London. It's not quite in the city... it's right on the cusp. And it is wonderful. I've been to the Great Barrier Reef many times, the wilds of the Amazon; I've ventured to both the Arctic and Antarctica, yet there's something so lovely and warming about watching the deer in Richmond Park while the morning mist rises up. It's one of life's simplest yet greatest gifts."
The house itself is an Edwardian property, and its interiors have been glimpsed over the years in various photographs: lilac carpets, white walls, brown leather sofas, a white bookcase, a dark oak dresser, wildlife pictures on the wall. Meanwhile, the garden is filled with bird feeders that attract local wildlife.
Following his Zoo Quest expeditions of the 1950s and early 1960s, the Richmond home became a temporary menagerie. As he wrote in Life on Air: "After each Zoo Quest trip, our menagerie in Richmond expanded slightly. The tanks and vivaria spread from the dining room into the hall. After a few years, we decided to devote an entire room on the ground floor to animals." A photograph from December 1957 shows the family gathered around a white cockatoo named Georgie, brought back from New Guinea, a Richmond sitting room briefly repurposed as a piece of the natural world. He has remained there since the death of his wife Jane almost 20 years ago — a constancy that feels significant for someone whose professional life has required almost perpetual motion.
The pub next door
For most people, buying the pub next door would be an unusual decision. For Attenborough, it was, aptly, an act of conservation. Concerned that the ‘Hole in the Wall’ would fall into disrepair and turn into a block of flats after closing, in 2009 he bought it. His plans for the site were, predictably, ecological: an orchard, a glasshouse, a bog garden for marsh plants, all while preserving the original facade.
Ever a man close to life's hidden discoveries, the building works had an unlikely reveal in store. Excavating beneath the old pub's stables, workers found a human skull, eventually identified as belonging to Julia Martha Thomas, a widow murdered by her housekeeper in 1879. The head had lain undiscovered for 131 years, a short distance from the man who had spent his career illuminating the hidden lives of the natural world. Richmond, it turned out, had its own buried story.
A neighbourhood and a legacy
Richmond has long attracted those who want proximity to London without full immersion in it. Its Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the vast deer park, and the Thames running through it make it, for a nature lover, something close to ideal. Attenborough said as much in Wild London, the documentary he made about his own city: “This is the place to which I have always returned. A sprawling mega-city may seem no home for a nature-lover like me, but there is a wild side to London. My city is surprisingly alive with all sorts of animals and full of remarkable natural spectacles.”
In his most recent film, Ocean with David Attenborough, released last year to coincide with his 99th birthday, Attenborough spoke candidly about approaching the end of his life. The admission was characteristically understated. But the film itself, and the Richmond garden, and the pub-turned-orchard next door, all suggest someone who has never stopped paying attention to the world immediately around him. A man who has seen everything the planet has to offer, and found that the view from his own garden still has something to say.
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