THE DUKE OF RICHMOND

Charles Gordon-Lennox, the eleventh Duke of Richmond, owns the Goodwood estate in West Sussex, north of Chichester, and runs it as chairman of the Goodwood Group of Companies. He founded the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 1993 and the Goodwood Revival in 1998, and the estate’s racecourse holds Glorious Goodwood each summer. Three engagements in the Almanac are on his land.

The Heir

He was styled Lord Settrington from birth, in 1955, and Earl of March and Kinrara from 1989 until he succeeded as Duke in 2017. He left Eton early for film and photography, and at seventeen worked for Stanley Kubrick on Barry Lyndon. In 1995 he moved from London to Goodwood House to take over the running of the estate, as the family’s heir customarily does at forty.

The Hill

Motor racing at Goodwood was his grandfather’s. Freddie March held a hillclimb on the estate in 1936, and in 1948, as Duke, opened a circuit on the perimeter track of the wartime airfield at Westhampnett; it closed in 1966. His grandson wanted racing back but had no permit for the circuit, and so in 1993 he held it in his own park. The first Festival of Speed was a single Sunday, 20 June 1993, with invited historic cars, and twenty-five thousand people came.

It grew a day at a time, to four days in 2019. After a record 158,000 came in 2003 the crowd was capped at 150,000, and tickets have since been sold only in advance. The course is the drive in front of the house, a mile and a sixth, climbing about three hundred feet past Molecomb and the flint wall. The Cartier Style et Luxe concours joined in 1995, Gerry Judah’s sculpture on the lawn in 1997, and a forest rally stage, laid out by Hannu Mikkola, in 2006. The Festival is never set against Le Mans or a Grand Prix.

The Circuit

The success of the Festival brought racing back to the circuit. The first Revival was held in 1998, fifty years after his grandfather opened the track, and not everyone wanted it; a numerous Goodwood Supporters Association helped win approval. It is raced for the kinds of car and motorcycle that ran there between 1948 and 1966, and no modern vehicle is allowed inside the perimeter all weekend except the fire and rescue vehicles. Some thirty areas of the circuit are dressed with period signs, and more than ten thousand costumes are made for eight hundred staff and performers. Period dress is encouraged, not required. Children race Austin J40 pedal cars for the Settrington Cup, named for the courtesy title he bore himself until 1989. It has been held every year since 1998 but 2020, and that of 2026 was the twenty-eighth.

The Racecourse

The racing on the Downs is older. In 1801 the third Duke lent the officers of the Sussex Militia a ridge called the Harroway, and in 1802 held a public meeting of three days. The racecourse is still part of the estate, alongside an organic farm of four thousand acres, two golf courses, an aerodrome and a hotel of ninety-one rooms. The Richmond Enclosure at Glorious Goodwood takes the family’s name.

Honours

He is President of the British Automobile Racing Club. He was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of West Sussex in 2006, and CBE in the New Year Honours of 2024, for services to heritage, sport and charity. In 2025 he launched the Goodwood Art Foundation, for contemporary art in the landscape of the estate.

The Season

His work is a season in itself: the Festival of Speed in the middle of July, from 15 to 18 July in 2027; Glorious Goodwood at the end of the month, from 27 to 31 July; the Revival in mid-September, from 17 to 19 September. The Court values what he did with an old estate: rather than keep its past behind a rope, he put it back to work, and the crowds came.