Venues in Kew

Kew is a village wrapped around a World Heritage Site. Princess Augusta founded a nine-acre physic garden beside her house in 1759; the Royal Botanic Gardens now cover 326 acres and hold the largest and most diverse botanical collection in the world. UNESCO inscribed the site in 2003 for its landscape, its glasshouses and its two and a half centuries of plant science. Kew Palace, built in 1631 as a merchant’s house in Flemish bond brick, is the oldest building inside the gates; George III and Queen Charlotte kept their family there.

The glasshouses are the reason to hold an event here. The Palm House, designed by Decimus Burton with the ironfounder Richard Turner and built between 1844 and 1848, was the first large structure raised in wrought iron and remains the most recognisable building in the gardens. The Temperate House, begun to Burton’s design in 1859, is the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world and reopened in 2018 after a five-year restoration. The Princess of Wales Conservatory followed in 1987, holding ten climate zones under one roof.

Outside the gates, Kew Green keeps its eighteenth-century houses, St Anne’s church of 1714 and a cricket pitch still in use. The National Archives sit on the far side of the gardens at the Thames end. Green space is the whole point and there is more of it beyond: the towpath runs downstream to Chiswick and upstream to Richmond. For access, Kew Gardens station serves the District line and the London Overground, and Kew Bridge is on South Western Railway — a little under forty minutes from the West End.