Liberty's Tudor-style London store was built from the timbers of two warships
The black-and-white beams of Liberty on Great Marlborough Street are not fake. When the store rose in 1924, its timber came from two Royal Navy ships, HMS Impregnable and HMS Hindustan, and the street frontage matches the Hindustan's length exactly. Nikolaus Pevsner hated the result.
Arthur Lasenby Liberty, born in Chesham in 1843, spent a decade at Farmer and Rogers on Regent Street from 1862. Passed over for partnership, he borrowed 2,000 pounds from his future father-in-law and in 1875 leased half a shop at 218a Regent Street with three employees. He cleared the debt within eighteen months, took the other half, and kept buying neighbouring buildings. Early stock leaned on ornaments, fabrics and art objects from Japan and the East; Dante Gabriel Rossetti bought blue and white Chinese ware there and brought in his fellow painter Whistler.
Growth was swift. A costume department opened in 1884 under the architect Edward William Godwin to rival Paris fashions, and in 1885 Liberty added 142–144 Regent Street for carpets and furniture, naming it Chesham House after his hometown. Oscar Wilde, a regular, called the shop the chosen haunt of artistic buyers in 1889. Through the 1890s Liberty backed designers such as Archibald Knox working in Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau, so closely that Italians called Art Nouveau Stile Liberty. Its Cymric silver and Tudric pewter lines ran from 1899 into the 1930s.
The father-and-son architects Edwin Thomas Hall and Edwin Stanley Hall arranged the mock-Tudor emporium around three light wells ringed by small, homely rooms, several with fireplaces. Pevsner complained that its scale, symmetry and setting were all wrong. Arthur Liberty never saw it; he died in 1917. The building gained Grade II* listing in 1972.
Liberty expanded beyond London from 1955, starting in Manchester and adding branches such as Bath, York and Norwich. In the 1960s designer Bernard Nevill, later design director, revived its textiles. Yves Saint Laurent bought thirteen designs from the winter 1970 range in thirty-four colourways, and a Nevill print named after Le Corbusier became the jumpsuit David Bowie wore on the Ziggy Stardust cover. The store still hunts for young designers, and its floral fabrics remain its best-known product.
Source: Liberty (department store)
