Richmond, Surrey is the setting for the Mayhew family’s move into suburban domestic life and for Dexter Mayhew’s struggle to inhabit the roles of husband, father and provider. The town’s promise of space, schools and a family home sits beside the expense and friction of renovation, while its streets and shops become the backdrop to Dexter’s attempts to manage work, childcare and his drinking.

Relocation and Setting

After resisting the move, Dexter and Sylvie Mayhew rent out their bachelor flat in Belsize Park for a substantial monthly sum and exchange it for a terraced house in Richmond. Surrey wins out for its perceived quality of life, good schools, transport links and deer in the Park; the house is also close to Sylvie’s parents and to friends who live nearby. Dexter objects that he is too young to move to Surrey, but the practical advantages carry the decision.

The move is not presented as an effortless arrival at family comfort. The couple begin an expensive, seemingly endless renovation in May, sanding wooden surfaces and knocking through non-supporting walls. Their Mazda sports car is replaced by a secondhand people carrier, a concrete sign of how family responsibilities are changing the household’s priorities.

The House and Family Life

Dexter had imagined settling in as a picturesque domestic scene: a young couple unpacking crockery, making a home and sharing night-feeds, with future beach outings and family walks to come. The actual house is filled with plaster dust, building work and conflict. Dexter helps the builders in small ways, making tea, fetching biscuits and picking up some basic Polish, while playing PlayStation over the noise of the floor-sander. Sylvie increasingly spends time at her parents’ house, ostensibly to avoid the builders and also to keep away from her listless husband.

The house is later called The House of Colic, a rueful name that places the strain of early parenthood directly inside the family home. Richmond is also identified as the birthplace of Jasmine Mayhew, born late on the third day of the new millennium. Dexter regards his daughter as inexpressibly beautiful and feels certain he would sacrifice his life for her, even as the surrounding domestic scenes show how far his confidence in his practical abilities falls short of that ideal.

Work and Daily Geography

Richmond is the endpoint of Dexter’s working-day journey after his television career falters. The Sport Xtreme broadcast slot drifts towards dawn, the series ends, and his paternity leave gives way to unemployment. He resists Sylvie’s suggestion that he take work offered by their friend Callum O'Neill, hoping instead for another presenting opportunity or work behind the camera. In the meantime, he helps with the renovation.

Later, Dexter works the morning shift at Natural Stuff from 6:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. After cashing up, he takes the train to Richmond and walks for twenty minutes through its streets of Victorian houses to the family home. The commute gives the town a practical, everyday scale: it is not merely the setting for the family’s move, but the place to which Dexter returns from a job that makes his former television status feel painfully remote.

Suburban Routine and Strain

On a Saturday evening, Dexter walks through Richmond with Jasmine in a front baby harness, heading to the shops while considering a cigarette and the possibility of calling an old girlfriend. Since Sylvie’s pregnancy, they have kept alcohol out of the house to discourage his casual drinking, but at an off-licence he buys two bottles of Bordeaux and twenty cigarettes. He returns with the sleeping baby still in the harness, pours a glass in the kitchen and drinks it, treating alcohol as an evening sedative. The house and its surrounding streets thus hold both the routines of care and the habits Dexter is trying, imperfectly, to control.

Richmond’s narrative significance lies in this contrast between an apparently settled family address and the unsettled life inside it. The move offers space, schools, transport and proximity to relatives, yet it also exposes the gap between Dexter’s imagined domestic future and his actual unemployment, marital friction and dependence on small consolations.