The history of the Kew Observatory

The building, known by a misnomer of at least half a century’s date as the Kew Observatory, while it is really situated at Richmond, is erected on, or close to, a part of the foundations of a much earlier structure, the old Carthusian Priory of Jesus of Bethlehem. We learn from Crisp’s “Richmond” that “the ancient hamlet of West Sheen occupied that portion of land now known as the Richmond Gardens, or Old Deer Park, and for the site of which hamlet or village we may perhaps take with tolerable correctness the present Observatory as the centre.”