Mindy Hammond, Richard Hammond’s Wife, and Her Own Writing Career

A writer before, during and after the marriage

Amanda “Mindy” Hammond, née Etheridge, married Richard Hammond in May 2002. The couple’s wider family life, and their 2025 separation, are covered on the private life page. This page covers something that page does not: her own, separate career as a writer, which predates the marriage and has continued through it.

Meeting in 1995, before either was well known

The two met in 1995, while both were working at a PR firm in London, several years before Top Gear made Richard a household name. By his own account, written later in On the Edge: My Story, he knew almost immediately that he had met his soul-mate, in his own words. It is a detail worth noting. It runs the other way from how most profiles of the marriage are framed: Mindy was not someone who entered his life once he was already famous.

A long-running newspaper column

Mindy Hammond has written a regular column for the Express titles for years, appearing in the Daily Express and its Sunday-supplement lifestyle title, S Magazine. Her column draws on family life, rural living and the couple’s own smallholding at Bollitree Castle in Herefordshire. Animals, land, the everyday texture of a working countryside home: it is told from her own perspective, not his.

Co-credited on “On the Edge”

Mindy is also credited alongside Richard on On the Edge: My Story, his 2007 memoir written in the aftermath of his 2006 crash. See the full book list for where it sits among his four published titles. Writing that book from inside the recovery itself, rather than about it from a distance, draws directly on the same column-writing instinct she brought to her newspaper work. It gave readers a rare account of a serious brain injury’s aftermath from the family’s side, not the patient’s alone.

A column built on everyday rural life, not the celebrity angle

What comes through consistently in her column work is a preference for the ordinary detail of running a smallholding over a polished celebrity-lifestyle angle: animals, land, weather, the practical texture of rural life. That approach has kept the column readable on its own terms, independent of whatever Richard happens to be filming at the time. It is part of why it is treated here as its own subject, rather than folded into the family-life material on the private-life page.

Why this gets its own page, briefly

Search demand around this domain includes Mindy Hammond specifically, not only as an entry on Richard’s private-life page but as a subject in her own right. She is a writer with a public byline of her own, not simply “Richard Hammond’s wife.” This page exists to answer that directly, without duplicating the family-history detail already covered on the private-life page. It stays deliberately short for the same reason. Her writing career is the subject here, not a full account of a life that, outside the column and the marriage, is genuinely her own and not this site’s to cover.