London's 14 oldest stores

One of the joys of shopping in London today comes from discovering any number of traditional stores that have remained little changed since they were founded hundreds of years ago. These are some of the oldest...

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1676 - Lock & Co Hatters (6 St. James’s St., SW1, tel 020 7930 8874, lockhatters.co.uk) is both the world’s oldest hat store and one of the oldest family businesses still in existence. Sir

Winston Churchill, Charles Chaplin, and Admiral Lord Nelson, among other luminaries, have donned Lock headwear. Let’s not forget Firmin & Sons, which doesn’t retain an old store but survives as probably the third oldest business in London after the Whitechapel Bell Foundry (1570) and the London Gazette (1665). It made belts, buttons, uniforms, and insignia; the company supplied buttons to every British monarch, officially, since 1796.

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Taken from National Geographic London Book of Lists: The City’s Best, Worst, Oldest, Greatest, and Quirkiest (National Geographic Books; ISBN 978-1-4262-1382-3; $19.95) by Tim Jepson and Larry Porges.

Picture: GETTY

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