It must have been with some relief that Richter shook off the dust of Vienna with its carping critics in the press when he set off for London, though no relaxation of his busy schedule lay before him. There was intense interest and fierce competition in the air when he arrived in the English capital with Wagner once again the focus of attention. Angelo Neumann was presenting three cycles of the Ring (followed by additional performances of Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung) throughout May, the first to be staged in London. This first cycle was already over when Richter arrived, the other two competed with the season of German opera promoted by Hermann Franke and Bernhard Pollini which he was contracted to conduct. Neumann was director of the Leipzig opera house, whilst Pollini held the same post in Hamburg. What with Gye's concurrent season including singers of the calibre of Patti, Albani, and Sembrich and his two successes Aida and Carmen (with Lucca in the title role), London's opera-goers and critics were treated to a surfeit of choice. Neumann had a starstudded cast including several singers from the Bayreuth Festival of 1876, among them Niemann, the Vogls, Lilli Lehmann and Schlosser. Emil Scaria, Theodor Reichmann and Hedwig Reicher-Kindermann were also in the company. Siegfried and Götterdämmerung were subjected to several unsatisfactory cuts and the scenery was deplorable. The conductor was Anton Seidl, whom Richter had brought to Bayreuth into the Nibelungen Chancellery. He made a good impression upon public and critics alike.

The Drury Lane German opera season, on the other hand, had Hans Richter as its leading attraction. The operas to be presented were (in order of opening) Lohengrin, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Fidelio, Die Meistersinger, Euryanthe and Tristan und Isolde; so in the course of six weeks from mid-May to the end of June 1882, Richter conducted twenty-nine opera performances with six Richter concerts interspersed among them (including Brahms’ German Requiem, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and his Choral Symphony), a taxing schedule of staggering proportions for a conductor who memorised his scores. His singers, as eminent as those at Her Majesty's Theatre, were Rosa Sucher, Therese Malten, Marianne Brandt, Josephine Schefsky, Hermann Winkelmann, Franz Nachbaur, Emil Kraus, Eugen Gura and Josef Ritter.