Teddington is an affluent suburb of London in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. Historically an ancient parish in the county of Middlesex and situated close to the border with Surrey, the district became part of Greater London in 1965. In 2021, The Sunday Times named Teddington as the best place to live in London, and in 2023, the wider borough was ranked first in Rightmove's Happy at Home index, making it the "happiest place to live in Great Britain"; the first time a London borough has taken the top spot.

Teddington is situated on a long meandering of the Thames between Hampton Wick and Strawberry Hill, Twickenham. Mostly residential, it stretches from the river to Bushy Park with the commercial focus on the A313 road. At Teddington's centre is the High Street and Broad Street, alongside mid-rise urban developments, containing offices and apartments. There is a suspension bridge over the lowest non-tidal lock on the Thames, Teddington Lock.

The district's commercial focus – containing shops, offices and other facilities – is along the A313, which is named (from west to east): Hampton Road, Broad Street and High Street. Broad Street contains a mixture of chain shops, cafes and supermarkets, alongside independent businesses, while the High Street is composed of nearly all local and independent businesses and restaurants from Teddington and South West London.

There are two clusters of offices on this route; on the edge of Bushy Park the National Physical Laboratory, National Measurement Office and LGC form a scientific centre. Around Teddington station and the town centre are a number of offices in industries such as direct marketing and IT, which include Tearfund and BMT Limited. Several riverside businesses and houses were redeveloped in the last quarter of the 20th century as blocks of riverside flats. Starting in 2016 the riverside site of the former Teddington Studios was redeveloped to provide modern apartment blocks and other smaller houses.

The lowermost lock on the Thames, Teddington Lock, which is just within Ham's boundary, is accessible via the Teddington Lock Footbridges. In 2001 the Royal National Lifeboat Institution opened the Teddington Lifeboat Station, one of four Thames lifeboat stations, below the lock on the Teddington side. The station became operational in January 2002 and is the only volunteer station on the river.

The place-name ‘Teddington’ is first attested in a Saxon charter of 969, where it appears as ‘Tudintún’ (’The Crawford Collection of Early Charters’, Oxford, 1895). It appears as ‘Tudincgatun’ in the ‘Cartularium Saxonicum’ edited by Birch, published in London from 1895-1893. It is listed as ‘Tudinton’ in the Feet of Fines for 1197. The name means “the tūn [town or settlement] of Tud(d)a’s people”.

Teddington is at the point of the River Thames where tidal flow ceases owing to it containing the 'final lock'. It has been postulated that the name thus derives from "Tide End Town." Such theory featured in Rudyard Kipling’s poem, "The River's Tale", which has the line "At Tide-end-town, which is Teddington." The poem was written to serve as the introduction to a history of England for schoolchildren, written by C. R. L. Fletcher, published by the Clarendon Press in Oxford in July 1911, and by Doubleday Page in New York in September 1911.

There have been isolated findings of flint and bone tools from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods in Bushy Park, and some unauthenticated evidence of Roman occupation. However, the first permanent settlement in Teddington was probably in Saxon times. Teddington was not mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as it was included under the Hampton entry.