Charles Henry Harrod opened a wholesale grocery on Cable Street in Stepney in 1834, specialising in tea. Fifteen years later, hoping to catch the foot traffic that the 1851 Great Exhibition would bring to Hyde Park, he took over a small shop in the village of Brompton. It was a single room, two assistants, and a messenger boy. By 1881 his son Charles Digby Harrod was running the place, employing a hundred people, and selling medicines, perfumes, stationery, and fruit. Then came the fire of December 1883, and the rebuild. The new building admitted credit accounts for the first time. The names on its early ledgers read like a guest list for Edwardian London: Oscar Wilde, Lillie Langtry, Ellen Terry, Noel Coward, Laurence Olivier, Sigmund Freud. The store that opened in its present form in 1905, designed by Charles William Stephens, has been Grade II*-listed since 1969.

On 16 November 1898, Harrods unveiled England's first escalator, the so-called "moving staircase." It was not the gleaming machine of today. It was a continuous belt of woven leather, framed in mahogany and silver-plate glass, that hauled itself slowly between floors. Customers stepped on with visible alarm. A member of staff stood at the top with a tray of brandy and smelling salts to revive anyone who had found the ascent traumatic. The detail is so perfectly Victorian it sounds invented; it is not. The same instinct for theatrical retailing produced the Egyptian Hall, the food halls with their painted tiles, the Christmas window displays that drew the schoolgirl Agatha Christie to gawp in 1926, and the elaborate seasonal teddy bears that have become collectors' items in their own right.

Harrods was a public company, then part of House of Fraser, then in 1985 acquired by the Egyptian-born businessman Mohamed Al Fayed for £615 million. He sold it to the Qatar Investment Authority in 2010 for £1.5 billion. Under the Fayed brothers the store changed in visible ways, including the elaborate Egyptian Escalator and two memorials to Al Fayed's son Dodi and Diana, Princess of Wales, who died together in Paris in 1997. The store also changed in ways the public could not see. Beginning with a BBC investigation in September 2024, a year after Al Fayed's death, more than twenty former female staff alleged that he had sexually assaulted them during his ownership, that Harrods had failed to intervene, and in some cases had actively helped cover up the abuse. The first allegation dates to 1985, the year he took over. The number of women coming forward has since grown into the hundreds. Harrods' current management has apologised and is paying compensation through a redress scheme; investigations continue.

Harrods has twice been a target of Provisional IRA attacks. The bombing of 17 December 1983, just outside the Brompton Road entrance during the busiest shopping week of the year, killed six people: Stephen Dodd, Noel Lane, and Jane Arbuthnot of the Metropolitan Police; the journalist Philip Geddes; and shoppers Kenneth Salvesen and Jasmine Cochrane-Patrick. Eighty-six others were injured, including fourteen police officers. A second, smaller bomb in 1993 wounded four. The plaque inside commemorating the 1983 attack is easy to walk past in the seasonal crush. Two doors away, a queue forms most days for the Harrods bears - successors to the Alpha Farnell teddy that A. A. Milne carried home for his son Christopher Robin in 1921. The pair of facts sits uneasily, which is how London often holds its difficult things, side by side.

The store's Latin motto, Omnia Omnibus Ubique, means "all things for all people, everywhere." In a sense it still tries to deliver on that promise. The 330 departments, spread across more than a million square feet, sell everything from bespoke fragrances to gold bullion to a Bentley parked in the showroom. Twenty-three restaurants serve high tea, tapas, and haute cuisine. The 12,000 staff come from more than fifty countries, and on peak shopping days up to 300,000 customers walk through the doors, the highest proportion from non-English-speaking countries of any store in London. The royal warrants were removed in 2000, burnt by Al Fayed and called a "curse." The Qatari ownership has kept the building, the bears, and the brand. Outside in Knightsbridge, the terracotta facade glows. Whatever else it is, Harrods is still extraordinarily good at being seen.