Harrods

Harrods, the famous London department store was founded in 1824 by Charles Henry Harrod. His first store was listed as a draper, mercer and haberdasher with premises on Borough High Street. He went on to set up a grocery business located in Upper Whitecross Street (Clerkenwell) in 1832 and in 1834 he established a wholesale grocery in Cable Street in Stepney in the East End of London which specialised in tea.

To capitalise on the trade opportunities created by the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, Harrod took over a small shop in the Brompton district which was within walking distance of Hyde Park, which was later to become the site of the famous store. Harrod’s son Charles Digby, built the business here into a thriving retail outlet selling fruit, vegetables, perfumes, stationery and medicines.

By 1880 they had rapidly expanded and were employing 100 people. Unfortunately their fortune reversed when they burnt to the ground in December of 1883. Charles managed to fulfill all of his commitments to customers for their Christmas orders that year and they made a record profit against the odds. They then went on to build a bigger and better store on the site and it became the preferred shop of celebrities of the time such as Oscar Wilde, Lillie Langry, Ellen Terry, Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Sigmund Freud, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, A.A. Milne and many members of the British Royal Family.

Harrods was the first store to install an escalator and this was opened on 16 November in 1898.

The store was bought by the Fayed Brothers in 1985 and sold on to the Qatar Investment Authority (the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar) in May 2010.

From 1910 to 2000 Harrods held a number of Royal Warrants from the British Royal family including Queen Elizabeth II, The Duke of Edinburgh, The Prince of Wales and The Queen Mother. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph in August 2010 Al-Fayad revealed he had burnt the Royal Warrants having taken them down in 2000. The Royal Family removed their Warrants at the end of 2000 subject to a five-year review.

The current store occupies a 5-acre site with over one million square feet of selling space, making it officially the largest retail department store in Europe.