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New Malden was established entirely as a result of the arrival of the railway when what is now called New Malden railway station was opened on 1 December 1846 on the main line from Waterloo. However, when Queen Victoria visited distinguished residents in the Coombe Hill area, the royal train always continued to Norbiton station where the platform was at ground level.

Building started slowly in the area just to the north of the station, gathering pace in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with two- and three-bedroom terraced houses. Further out are larger detached and semi-detached houses from the 1930s. The name of the road up the hill to Coombe, Traps Lane, is thought to derive from a farm owned by a Mrs Trap. Following the opening of the Kingston bypass in 1927, the farms to its south progressively gave way to suburban development.

Two miles (3 km) to the south is the former village of Old Malden (from which New Malden gets its name) whose origins go back to Anglo-Saxon times, the name being Old English for Mæl + duna = "the cross on the hill".

Under the District Councils Act 1895, The Maldens & Coombe Urban District Council was created (the plural relating to Old Malden and New Malden). In 1936 Malden and Coombe was granted full Borough status, with its own Mayor, and had the rare distinction of a civic mace bearing the royal insignia of King Edward VIII. In 1965, the London Government Act 1963 came into force merging the boroughs of Malden & Coombe and Surbiton with Kingston upon Thames to form the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames.

New Malden is home to the offices of many large organisations, including Nestle Purina and Northrop Grumman.

The Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames has one of the largest expatriate communities of South Koreans in Europe, and is said to be one of the most densely populated area of Koreans outside South Korea. According to different sources, as of 2014 there were about 10,000 ethnic Koreans in New Malden proper, and as of the same year the Korean population in the area around New Malden is around 20,000, including about 600 originating from North Korea, giving it the largest group of North Koreans in Europe. In the 2001 census, some small areas of New Malden had "Other Asian" (i.e., other than of Indian sub-continental origin, which also included Chinese) populations of "over 25%", though no whole ward reached over 20%. Many of the Koreans living in New Malden work for Korean companies, and they are either permanently settled and formerly expatriate, or they are still expatriates. In 2015 Paul Fischer of The Independent wrote that the North Koreans were insular, and that there were tensions between the South Korean majority and the North Koreans in New Malden.