Season four has broken Apple TV’s premiere records, and Richmond-upon-Thames is feeling the effects. From Ted’s fictional flat to the pub that plays the Crown and Anchor, here’s why the show’s fans keep showing up in a suburb that never asked to be famous.
Richmond-upon-Thames has a deer park older than the monarchy, the ruins of a Tudor palace and the longest stretch of the Thames within London’s boundaries. Lately it also has American tourists queueing outside a deli on a narrow lane called Paved Court, and the deer park doesn’t have much to do with it. They are there for a moustachioed, over-caffeinated football coach who cannot grasp the offside rule.
“Ted Lasso” has turned this suburb into one of the most searched-for filming locations in Britain. Season four, back this summer after a long gap, broke Apple TV’s own premiere records. Every new viewer seems to produce a new visitor to Richmond, camera in hand, hunting for a bench.
The itinerary that didn’t exist five years ago
Before 2020, nobody was building a trip around this stretch of southwest London. Now there is an official “Ted Lasso” store on Paved Court selling AFC Richmond kits and biscuit tins. At least three tour companies run fans past the same twenty-odd landmarks, including Ted’s fictional apartment, Rebecca’s front door and the wooden bench outside The Prince’s Head, the pub that plays the show’s Crown and Anchor.
Local hotels have told American media they are seeing double the number of US visitors since the show aired, enough that Richmond’s tourism board now runs a dedicated page for it.
Richmond Green, a stretch of common land that once hosted royal jousting tournaments, sits at the centre of most itineraries, where visitors now recreate Ted’s coffee-in-hand strolls. The riverfront draws its own crowd, mostly for the scene that sends Roy Kent and Keeley Jones walking across Richmond Bridge, which fans retrace with the same buskers still playing along the water.
One landmark tourists never find: the team’s home ground. AFC Richmond’s stadium, called “the dog track” on the show, is actually Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park, filmed ten miles away in south London.
The show premiered in August 2020, into a pandemic-flattened world that had a fairly obvious appetite for the sincerity it offered. Roy Kent, the gruffest player on the roster, spends his evenings watching reality dating shows with the women from his yoga class.
Sam Obisanya takes on a club sponsor over its environmental record back home. It could easily tip into syrup, and mostly doesn’t, because the writing keeps reaching for specific, odd details instead of general uplift.
Season four gives Ted a new job coaching a second-division women’s football team, with Tanya Reynolds joining as his assistant. It fits a show that has spent four seasons widening who gets to be the hero of a football story, and it seems to be landing with viewers who wanted more women on screen in a sport the show has always used as cover for other things.
A local’s-eye view
Not everyone in Richmond is charmed. Longtime residents complain about turning up, uninvited, in the background of strangers’ holiday photos outside their own front doors, and at least one has admitted to giving up on the show after fifteen minutes. His loyalty stays with the actual pub next door to the famous one, the same street holding both a fictional destination and a real one that nobody is queueing for.