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East Sheen, also known as Sheen, is a suburb in south-west London in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames.
Its long high street has shops, offices, restaurants, cafes, pubs and suburban supermarkets and is also the economic hub for Mortlake of which East Sheen was once a manor. This commercial thoroughfare, well served by public transport, is the Upper Richmond Road West which connects Richmond to Putney. Central to this street is The Triangle, a traffic island with a war memorial and an old milestone dating from 1751, marking the 10 miles (16 km) distance to Cornhill in the City of London.
The main railway station serving the area, Mortlake, is centred 300 metres (980 ft) north of this. Sheen has a mixture of low-rise and mid-rise buildings and it has parks and open spaces including its share of Richmond Park, accessed via Sheen Gate; Palewell Common, which has a playground, playing fields, tennis courts and a pitch and putt course; and East Sheen Common which is owned by the National Trust and leads into Bog Gate, another gate of Richmond Park.
Sheen Lane runs south from the junction of Mortlake High Street and Lower Richmond Road, over the level crossing at Mortlake station and the crossroads at Upper Richmond Road West, and up the hill to East Sheen Gate.
The earliest recorded use of the name is c. 950 as Sceon and means shed or shelters. The area was designated separately from Sheen (an earlier name for Richmond) from the 13th century, as the southern manor of Mortlake.
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