Qualla: Liberty (department store)

Liberty (department store): Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maggie Jones from London, England, Public domain. Walk in from Great Marlborough Street on a Saturday afternoon and you are inside a galleon. The atrium climbs four storeys around a central light well; the floorboards are seventeenth-century oak; the staircases creak in a way that no Selfridges or Harrods staircase ever creaks. The story that the building was put together from the timbers of two Royal Navy warships sounds, on the face of it, like a Victorian tour-guide myth. It is not. In 1924 the architects bought HMS Impregnable and HMS Hindustan from the breakers at Devonport and used the deck oak to frame the new Liberty's. The Great Marlborough Street frontage is, deliberately, the exact length of HMS Hindustan's main deck. The store has been here, in some form, since 1875.

Image: Maggie Jones from London, England | Public domain

Liberty (department store): Arthur and the Loan

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ricardalovesmonuments, CC BY-SA 4.0. Arthur Lasenby Liberty was born in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, in 1843. He came to London as a young man and worked at a Regent Street shop called Farmer & Rogers, which sold ornaments and silks from Japan and the East. Liberty asked for a partnership in 1874 and was refused. Withi...

Image: Ricardalovesmonuments | CC BY-SA 4.0

Liberty (department store): Stile Liberty

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit habitatgirl, CC BY 2.0. Through the 1880s and 1890s, Liberty became the great London promoter of Arts and Crafts, Aesthetic Movement, and what would soon be called Art Nouveau. He commissioned Archibald Knox to design pewter and silver pieces - 'Tudric' and 'Cymric' - that are now among the most collect...

Image: habitatgirl | CC BY 2.0

Liberty (department store): Tudor Galleon

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No Swan So Fine, CC BY-SA 4.0. Arthur Liberty died in 1917, seven years before the new store was finished. The plan had been bold: Liberty's would expand off Regent Street onto Great Marlborough Street, occupying a whole block, with the new building done in the Tudor revival style that was fashionable in the e...

Image: No Swan So Fine | CC BY-SA 4.0

Liberty (department store): Ziggy Stardust's Jumpsuit

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Spiessens, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1960s the design director Bernard Nevill - hired first as a consultant, then promoted - reinvigorated Liberty's textile archive. He pulled vibrant designs from the original Arts and Crafts catalogues and reissued them in new colourways. Yves Saint Laurent walked through th...

Image: Spiessens | CC BY-SA 4.0

Liberty (department store): Still Here

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Gillett, CC BY-SA 2.0. Liberty has had a turbulent half-century. The company opened twenty regional shops outside London after 1955 - Manchester, Bath, Brighton, York - and closed them all in 1996 when the central business model could no longer carry them. The flagship store was sold and leased back in...

Image: Paul Gillett | CC BY-SA 2.0