The cemetery has been expanded several times and now occupies a 15-acre (6-hectare) site which, prior to the expansion of London, was a rural area of Surrey.

Many prominent people are buried in the cemetery, as are 39 soldiers who died at the South African Hospital in Richmond Park during the First World War and many ex-servicemen from the nearby Royal Star and Garter Home.

Act 1785 (25 Geo.3 c.41), which granted Pesthouse Common, formerly owned by King George III, to Richmond vestry.

[1] The site was originally a simple square plot divided into four by footpaths; between 1865 and 1879, the cemetery expanded and subsumed the land between the original site and the workhouse, which was laid out in a grid format, and by 1894 the cemetery had further expanded onto a plot of land to the north, also in a grid layout.

The two cemeteries are today joined, forming a contiguous area of graves, though the original boundary is still denoted by a holly hedge.

[2] Richmond Cemetery originally contained two chapels, one of Church of England denomination and one for Nonconformists, both built in the Gothic Revival style.

The front of the building has a buttressed arch above the main door, which bears the inscription "In the Garden was a new sepulchre, there laid they Jesus".

Its design is unusual for an English cemetery chapel, featuring significant plate tracery and decorative sculpture, but the architect is unknown.

Dedicated to Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Charles Bromhead and his wife Margaret, former governors of the home, it takes the form of a triptych with stone panels, in front of which is a low spine wall; both the spine walls and the panels in the triptych are engraved with the names of deceased ex-servicemen from the home who are not commemorated elsewhere.

It was designed by Cecil Thomas and was unveiled in 1957 as a gift from the governor of the home in a ceremony presided over by Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke and the Bishop of Southwark.

It is of coarse granite construction, with a springbok inscribed in the apex of the front and rear while the sides both carry a carved stone wreath; the only text inscribed on the monument are the phrases "union is strength" and "our glorious dead" on the front, and the same text translated into Dutch on the rear.

[17][18] The cenotaph became a focus for commemorations in the 1920s and 1930s, after which it appears to have been forgotten and was neglected until 1981 when the CWGC became aware of it and agreed with the South African government to take responsibility for its upkeep.