About This Site — The Hamster’s Cage

The story behind the Richard Hammond Fan Page

The Hamster’s Cage was built by long-time fans of Top Gear and cars in general, who followed Richard Hammond’s career from his years on Top Gear and The Grand Tour through to his current work. It exists as a single, well-organised place to check the facts of that career rather than piecing it together across scattered pages.

The site is run independently by its editors, in their own words and on their own editorial judgement.

What this site covers

The site is organised around five areas of Richard Hammond’s career and life: a career biography covering his early life, education and route into broadcasting; a full TV and filmography record spanning Top Gear through to his current work; a list of his published books; a private life page covering his family; and an ongoing news log of appearances and career updates as they happen.

Beyond that, a wider set of pages covers ventures, honours and public-facing work either side of his broadcasting career: DriveTribe, the automotive media startup he co-founded and which closed in 2022; The Smallest Cog, the classic-car restoration business he still runs today; his car and motorcycle collection; the international Top Gear specials; his early-career run on Brainiac: Science Abuse; his awards and recognition; his Vice-President role at The Children’s Trust; his appearances at CarFest; and, briefly, Mindy Hammond’s own writing career. Between them, these fourteen pages are meant to cover the full public record — broadcasting, publishing, business ventures, honours, charity work and family life — rather than any one slice of it.

How this is kept accurate

Every page on this site is checked against public sources — press coverage, official broadcaster listings, and Richard Hammond’s own public statements — before it is written or changed. The news page states the same standard directly: each entry is checked before it is added, and each one is dated.

Nothing is checked once and left. When a page needs updating — a new TV credit, a change in family circumstances, a correction from a reader — the change is made and the page is re-checked rather than left to drift out of date. Where a fact genuinely cannot be verified against a public source, the safer choice on this site is to leave it out rather than guess.

Who writes and edits this

Content here is written and maintained by an editorial team rather than a single named author, and no page on this site is credited to an invented persona. That is a deliberate choice on a domain named after somebody else’s career: the record should stand on its sourcing, not on who happens to have written a particular page.

What this site is not

This is not Richard Hammond’s official website, and it is not operated by him, his management, or any broadcaster he has worked with. It carries no advertising and no sponsorship arrangement of its own.

It is also not a live schedule or booking service — it will not tell you where Richard Hammond is appearing next week, and it cannot arrange an interview, an appearance or a message to him. What it offers instead is a record of what has already happened and been confirmed publicly, kept as current as a reference like this reasonably can be.

The name and the framing here are deliberately plain: this is a reference, compiled by fans, for anyone who wants Richard Hammond’s career and public life recorded accurately in one place rather than scattered across dozens of other pages.

How a page like this gets built

Most pages here are more than a paragraph of prose: the TV record is a filterable filmography table, the books page lists full publication detail rather than a bare title list, and the news log is dated entry by entry rather than one static block of text. That format is chosen deliberately — a career spanning more than two decades and several different ventures is easier to check in a structured list than buried in a single long article.

Corrections

If something on this site is out of date or incorrect, get in touch via the contact page and it will be checked and corrected.