Finding London’s most distinctive shops

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The wine and spirit shop Berry Bros. & Rudd occupies three adjacent spaces on St James Street and Pall Mall in London. Photo / Jeremie Souteyrat, The New York Times
Sure, you can hit Harrods. But the British capital also has small specialised shops, some centuries old and still crafting items by hand. Here are a selection of singular shopping experiences, writes Alexander Wooley

A bottle of gin, a Paddington bear or a wicker picnic hamper full of
jam and scones — these are just a few of the purchases the 20 million international travellers pick up while visiting London each year, often at famous British retailers like Harrods and Fortnum & Mason.

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But scattered across London are also small, specialised shops, some centuries old and crafting items by hand, that sell unique wares in spots full of wonder. These retailers are the favourites of politicians, celebrities and royalty — some display royal crests on windows and packaging, a sign that they have received royal warrants from the monarchy — and each has a story to tell of humble beginnings, of perseverance through fires and wars, pandemics and fickle tastes.
Here’s a selection of some of the most eccentric — or at least, distinctive.
Lock & Co. Hatters
6 St. James’s Street
Founded in 1676, Lock & Co. is the oldest shop in London and the world’s oldest hat shop. Holding numerous royal warrants over the centuries, and currently a newly issued one from King Charles III, it has been at No. 6 St. James’s Street since 1759, when it moved across the road because the light was better. It’s a tall, narrow townhouse one might easily walk past. Winston Churchill is seen wearing its Cambridge and homburg hats in World War II photos; Adm. Horatio Nelson was wearing a Lock bicorn when he died at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The Mad Hatter is reputedly based on a Lock salesman — Lewis Carroll was a customer. More recently, actors Gary Oldman and Bill Nighy have been said to insist on Lock hats for film roles.
Lock is perhaps most famous for having invented the quintessential English hat, the bowler. Commissioned by the Earl of Leicester, who wanted a hard hat for gamekeepers at his country estate, the bowler became de rigueur for labourers and railway workers before it became synonymous with London bankers. If you’re purchasing a bowler or another hat with a rigid construction, like a top hat, the salespeople still measure your head with a “conformateur,” an egg-shaped, brass device lined with keys that was invented in France in the 1850s.
These days caps like the newsboy and bakerboy, which range in price from GB125 ($263.75) to GB375 ($791.25), are Lock’s best sellers. The shop also sells linen and cashmere baseball caps.
Berry Bros. & Rudd
3 St. James’s Street
Berry Bros. & Rudd, selling wine and spirits, occupies three adjacent spaces on St. James’s Street and Pall Mall. Founded by “the Widow Bourne” as a grocery in 1698, initially it supplied local coffeehouses, so the sign over the door remains a coffee mill. Another relic from BB&R’s earlier incarnation is a set of scales: 200 years ago, when to know one’s weight meant going to a doctor and paying a fee, BB&R installed a seat on the scales and it became a London entertainment to weigh yourself there and enter the result in a ledger — the ledgers, as well as the scales, are available for viewing.
Today, French wines dominate the shelves, but Italians are growing in popularity. While BB&R sells rare vintage bottles that can cost tens of thousands of pounds, there are wines as inexpensive as GB12 ($25.30). What brings customers back is the selection — there are two acres (.8 of a hectare) of cellars underneath the shop — and the expert customer service. In the world, there are only 417 people who hold Master of Wine certifications, which require at least three years of study, and BB&R employs three. Customers often visit when they are considering starting their own wine collections and want advice. These days, visitors can also join one of the in-store, twice-monthly wine tastings.
John Lobb
9 St. James’s Street
A pungent smell of rich leather hits the customer entering John Lobb, a family-owned bespoke shoemaker. The atmosphere is studious, serious. Legend has it that a lame Cornish farm boy named John Lobb, after being rejected by all of the major London shoemakers, set himself up in a tent in rural Australia to cater to gold rush prospectors. In 1863 he sent the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) a pair of riding boots that were of such quality, he was awarded a royal warrant. (It is a mystery as to how he knew the prince’s feet dimensions.)
These days, plum carpets and upholstery and dark wooden cabinetry are juxtaposed with open workshops where master craftspeople are at work. There are no factory-made shoes at Lobb, and no one gets a free ride — the three fifth-generation Lobb brothers who run the shop today each had to go through several years of apprenticeship to learn how to make a pair of shoes, shadowing Lobb specialists who carry titles like the Clicker, the Pattern Cutter and the Closer. One of these is the Last-Maker, a “last” being a precise wooden model of the customer’s feet.
Lobb has a display case of lasts from famous past clients, including Duke Ellington. Often customers come in with a precise idea of the design of the shoe they have in mind, and Lobb sets out to execute it. The whole process takes up to eight months for a first-time customer. A pair of shoes can cost GB3,800 ($8000), boots nearly GB23,000 ($48,530).
Marby and Elm
53 Exmouth Market
Over in buzzy Exmouth Market, Marby and Elm is cheeky, whimsical and barely a decade old. It started off in a garden shed, which “got too full, too inky,” said Eleanor Tattersfield, the owner-designer. Tattersfield moved the shop, named for her two sons, in 2017 to its current fluorescent pink location, where it serves as a handmade card-and-stationery shop and workshop. Top sellers include a “Victorian brothel candle” packaged in a dusky brown glass holder embossed with Victorian script and priced at GB35 ($74), produced in conjunction with an English candle maker. Cards — all handmade in limited runs — carry messages like “You’re my Roman Empire” and “Of course I bloody love you.” Cards range from GB5 ($10.55) to GB9 ($19).
Though the shop may be new — at least compared with John Lobb and Lock & Co. — Tattersfield employs a manual typewriter as well as two manual letterpress machines, including a century-old Adana flatbed, that use lead-and-wood letters.
“I’m working in an analogue world,” she said. During the pandemic she sent out postcards asking for the public’s lockdown secrets. She used some of their 4,000 responses to write a book, “Lockdown Secrets” (GB13 – $27.50), that includes verbatim reproductions of the cards.
Blenheim Forge
Arch 228-229, Blenheim Grove
Under a Victorian-era railway arch beneath the graffiti-sprayed Peckham Rye train station, Blenheim Forge creates high-end kitchen blades for Gordon Ramsay, Nancy Silverton and other top chefs of the world. It’s a combination of retail shop and noisy blacksmith, where knives are forged by hand from sheets of laminated steel imported from Japan.
Two of the partners behind Blenheim Forge, James Ross-Harris and Rich Warner, have engineering degrees. According to Ross-Harris, he and Warner started making knives about 10 years ago when they were “messing about,” one weekend. (A third partner, Jonathan Warshawsky, dropped out of a philosophy Ph.D. program to make knives.) Now, limited releases of a new knife design often sell out within a day, and a 26-set piece can set you back GB34,000 ($71,740).
The wood for the handles — walnut, hornbeam, bog oak — all comes from fallen trees in royal parks or on public lands. To source the wood, Blenheim works with a nearby timber nonprofit, London Reclaimed, that employs teens and adults who have dropped out of the education system.
“I think most people are blown away when they visit us, when they see the amount of work that goes into making a knife,” Ross-Harris said.
Paxton & Whitfield
93 Jermyn Street, Westminster
Begun in 1742 as a cheese stall in a London market, Paxton & Whitfield received its first royal warrant from Queen Victoria in 1850. It now has four locations, including one in Westminster.
The street sign on this shop dates from the 1890s, and the store frontage is a rich black and gold. A bright and modern interior has battlements of stacked full wheels of cheese that separate customers and staff — the latter can advise on putting together a cheese board, and will not let customers buy their wares without first having a sample.
Most of the cheeses are aged, turned and rubbed in oil inside five maturing rooms Paxton’s has in Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswold Hills. The blue-veined Stilton – GB34 ($71.75) per kilo – is Paxton’s top seller — Winston Churchill enjoyed it when he used to frequent the shop — but there are also gems like the Sparkenhoe Red Leicester – GB42 ($88.65) a kilo; new varieties like the ewe’s milk Cullum – GB52 ($110) a kilo, and named for the original market stall founder, Stephen Cullum); and a coffee-matured cheese called Kaldi – GB62 pounds ($130) per kilo. Kaldi, the result of a collaboration with Rave Coffee, is brine-washed goat’s cheese coated with a finely ground coffee for a spicelike texture.
John Sandoe Books
10-12 Blacklands Terrace, Chelsea
Occupying three connected 18th-century cottages on Blacklands Terrace is John Sandoe. The narrow street is just off the main drag from the expensive chain shops that took over Chelsea once the borough became cool.
The shop has the biggest poetry section of any bookshop in London, and its décor is well-trodden Persian rugs, fresh-cut flowers in vases, window seats and narrow staircases that feel as if one is ascending a lighthouse.
John Sandoe has relationships with some 150 small publishers in addition to the major players, but many of the new books on display have come from customer suggestions. Current staff members review books for major British media, while former bookshop employees started Cuckoo Press, which each year in the run-up to Christmas produces a long-form pamphlet, suggesting mostly new short stories by writers such as Muriel Spark, William Boyd and Juliet Nicolson. The year-end gifts are offered to long-standing customers, the likes of which include Elton John and Rupert Everett.
A decade ago, on its own initiative, the bookshop printed Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s novel “My Brilliant Friend.” The book was published as a result of an unsolicited letter Sandoe shop owners sent to Ferrante through her publisher, Europa Editions, before she had become world famous. The mysterious Ferrante also ended up signing the books — they’re believed to be the only signed Ferrantes in the world. They quickly sold out, but the shop kept two.
GETTING THERE
Fly from Auckland to London with one stopover with multiple airlines, including Qatar Airways, Emirates, Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines and Air NZ, often on a Star Alliance Codeshare basis.
DETAILS
visitbritain.com/en
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alexander Wooley
Photographs by: Jeremie Souteyrat
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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