The Home on the hill
The Odyssey Administration Centre operated from The Royal Star and Garter Home on Richmond Hill, Richmond, Surrey - the charity's landmark neo-Georgian building overlooking the Thames, opened in 1924 and home to generations of disabled ex-Service men and women.
This was the project's operational heart. The call centre took telephone orders here; the postal team opened, scanned and indexed the veterans' submissions here; and the ticket printers ran here, driven in real time by the central system over a leased line installed specifically for the project. The servers and network that ran the Odyssey were installed and operated on this site - the technology page describes what they did.
Since repurposed
The building is Grade II listed and one of the most prominent landmarks on the Thames at Richmond, but it could not be adapted to modern care standards. The charity sold it in 2013, and it has since been converted into apartments - the Odyssey's operations rooms are now private homes.
The Royal Star & Garter charity continues its mission today from modern, purpose-built homes in Solihull, Surbiton and High Wycombe, caring for veterans and their families living with disability or dementia. It marked its 110th anniversary in 2026, with HRH The Princess Royal as patron.
- Royal Star & Garter - the charity today
- The charity's history
- The Richmond building on Wikipedia
- Historic England listing (Grade II, entry 1254353)
The building photographs on this page are by third-party photographers, used under their Creative Commons BY-SA licences with attribution as captioned; they are not part of the project archive.