Richard Hammond and The Children’s Trust: His Charity Role Explained

A charity for children with brain injury

The Children’s Trust, based at Tadworth Court in Tadworth, Surrey, is a UK charity that runs the country’s largest rehabilitation centre for children with acquired brain injury and related neurodisability. It supports children recovering from injury or illness affecting the brain, along with their families. That support runs through specialist residential rehabilitation, education and ongoing community care. The charity dates to 1984. That year the Department of Health transferred management of Tadworth Court to the newly formed organisation from Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Vice-President, not a one-off endorsement

Richard Hammond has served as a Vice-President and long-standing ambassador of The Children’s Trust for years. It goes beyond a single appearance or a name lent to a campaign. He has appeared in the charity’s own fundraising material asking the public directly to support its work, and continues to be associated with it well beyond any single press moment.

Why this cause, specifically

The connection to Hammond’s own life is not subtle, and he has not tried to make it so. On 20 September 2006, he suffered a serious brain injury, a diffuse axonal injury, in a high-speed crash while filming; the full account is on the biography page. A charity built specifically around children recovering from brain injury carries an obvious personal resonance for someone who went through his own long recovery from one. His own injury happened as an adult, not a child, but the resonance still holds.

Backing the Brain Injury Hub

In August 2012, Hammond publicly backed the launch of the Brain Injury Hub, a Children’s Trust initiative built as an information and support resource for parents of children with acquired brain injury. He described the resource as vital for families navigating a diagnosis with little existing guidance. He gave it his direct public backing at launch, a concrete example of the ambassador role beyond just attaching a name to the cause. Trade coverage of the launch at the time credited him directly as the figure putting a public face on a resource that would otherwise have had little profile outside the charity sector itself.

The specialist rehabilitation The Children’s Trust provides covers relearning basic skills and adapting to lasting changes in memory, movement or communication. It is the same broad territory Hammond himself went through after his own crash, even as an adult rather than one of the children the charity itself supports. That practical overlap, not just a shared cause on paper, is likely part of why the ambassador role has lasted this long rather than fading after one appeal.

Part of a wider pattern of public appearances

The Children’s Trust work sits alongside other public, largely charitable appearances Hammond makes each year. His regular presence at CarFest, the Chris Evans-founded festival that raises money for children’s charities more broadly, is one of them. Read together, the two pages describe a fairly consistent picture. These are public appearances tied to causes with a real connection to his own life and interests, not a scattered set of unrelated endorsements.