Tanya Gold

Better than the original: Scott’s Richmond reviewed

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issue 21 January 2023

Scott’s, Richmond, is a fish, champagne and oyster bar, and a new branch of Scott’s, Mayfair. The original Scott’s was part of what became the Trocadero Centre. (Ian Fleming was a regular. He would take captured U-boat officers there to get them drunk and chatty. James Bond visited too.) It moved to Mount Street and was bombed by the IRA in 1975. This Scott’s is on the Thames at Richmond and is part of a development by the King’s favourite architect Quinlan Terry, who managed, in the mid 1980s, to throw up a Domestic Revival village on the water. It looks very weird, but I’ve always liked it because the alternative is worse.

It is probably too sumptuous for Richmond, which should smell of wet dog and river mud, but local wives think otherwise

I went to school in Richmond; I remember the holes in the brick wall of the poppy factory.

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