SOUTH Western Railway (SWR) is marking the 35th anniversary of the Hampton Court Garden Festival as part of its Railway 200 celebrations.
The first festival - the Hampton Court Flower Show - took place from 11-15 July 1990 and was the idea of entrepreneur Adrian Boyd. Working as a consultant for Network SouthEast’s marketing team, he saw it as an opportunity to build on the historic Chelsea Flower Show and promote leisure travel.
It cost the princely sum of £100,000 (just under £250,000 today) and was opened by Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal. Network SouthEast had their own garden complete with model trains operated by the Gauge 1 Model Railway Association, who provided live steam trains and a ‘Networker’, Network SouthEast’s latest train.
The idea for the event was seen as a gamble, but the festival paid for itself within its first few days thanks to a marketing campaign that brought in customers from far and wide. After three successful editions and hundreds of thousands of visitors, the festival was taken over by the Royal Horticultural Society.
To mark the 35th anniversary, SWR and the Royal Horticultural Society welcomed Network SouthEast’s former Managing Director, Chris Green, and former PR Assistant and later Communications Manager, Dennis Lovett, to the 2025 festival.
Chris Green said:
“The Hampton Court Flower Show was the most spectacular event that Network SouthEast ever promoted, and I remember it as our golden age. The number of visitors to the first event was awesome - with an estimated 50,000 travelling by rail each day.
“The event has become the largest garden show in the UK and would probably have never been launched without Network SouthEast’s early support. It has been a roaring success since its opening day in July 1990 – and the rest is history.”
Dennis Lovett said:
“At the time of the festival I was the junior in Network SouthEast’s fledgling PR department. On the first day of the festival, my wife and I looked after guests in one of the carriages on our special non-stop train from London Waterloo to Hampton Court, with refreshments being served to celebrities, people from the gardening world, and a lot of transport correspondents. Being a PR man I was too busy to sit down!
“Staff at every station from London Waterloo to Hampton Court wore fresh carnations, and everybody made a really big effort to feel part of the event. It really was a big exercise for us, and a bit of a risk. That risk didn’t last very long - trains were packed, it was a massive success, and here we are 35 years later and it’s still going.”
On top of the ‘Tudor Rose’ special, where celebrities were wined and dined, a special service of six trains per hour ran between London Waterloo and Hampton Court.
Today, SWR continue to provide additional services for the event, which this year saw the introduction of its new Arterio trains. In a coincidental throwback to 1990, one of those Arterios is named ‘The Red Rose’.
