Another Visit To London’s First Department Store
Pall Mall was one of Georgian London’s most fashionable streets and its proximity to St James’ Palace meant that Anthony Harding’s store, Harding, Howell’s & Co Grand Fashionable Magazine, London’s first department store, was not short of royal visitors, for whom he would shut the store so that they could browse undisturbed. George III commissioned Harding to design and make the hangings for his bedroom at Kew and to market the cloth produced from the royal flocks of merino sheep that grazed at Windsor.
Harding was never slow to exploit an opportunity. After designing some dress silks for Queen Charlotte, he marketed them to the public as “Queen’s silk”, while he ensured that a piece of the chintz produced for the Prince of Wales was pasted to every issue of Ackerman’s Repository of Arts alongside the advertisement for his shop. Samples of the chintz were also sent to every entrant in Debrett’s Peerage to remind them of his royal patronage.
Although at pains to reassure his customers that “all their furnishing fabrics were made in England”, Harding was not oblivious to what the wider world could offer, claiming to be able to supply “every article of foreign manufacture which there is any possibility of obtaining”. A demand for lace led him to establish a lace factory on the premises, headed by a Flemish expert who would instruct “young women respectably connected and of good conduct” in the art of lacemaking for a fee of £10 each. He would also export goods around the world.
Harding was also saw innovation as a means of keeping ahead of his competitors. A newly patented permanent green dye for chintz, for which he secured the sole trading rights, was advertised as “a discovery never before offered to the public”. In 1807 he quickly recognised that the newly installed gas lighting in Pall Mall, the first street to be so illuminated, would show off his printed chintzes and textiles to great effect if they were displayed in the window. Some of his claims, though, strained credulity. A hair dye was advertised as “the best Dye in the universe for immediately changing red or grey hair”.
Shoplifters felt the full force of the law. In 1799 Mary Wilson, aged forty-seven, was found guilty of stealing goods to the value of twelve shillings, namely some black ribbon, two pairs of cotton mittens and a silk handkerchief, a crime for which she was sentenced to seven years transportation. She died in Newgate prison two months after her trial.
However, by the standards of the time, Harding was remarkably lenient towards crimes committed by his own employees. In 1817 Samuel Arnold stole £74 in cash and £35 in promissory notes, a crime punishable by death. At his trial at the Old Bailey, he was found guilty, but a director of Harding’s spoke in his favour, describing him as a trusted employee who had always “acted honourably” and whose lapse was down to the malign influence of his new wife. When he declared that Harding’s would have Arnold back, there was “a buzz of applause” in the court room, moving the judge to spare the prisoner who was promptly re-employed.
In December 1819 the business moved to 9, Regent Street, opposite Carlton House. Shoppers were by now buying goods on a whim rather than out of necessity, an appetite fed by Harding’s willingness to be “quite prepared to offer a regular succession of novelty throughout the season”. Their fame spread as far as China where a correspondent in 1834 reported a demand for things “pretty, odd, and new at Howell’s and Harding’s”. The company’s Royal Warrant as “Silk Mercer by Appointment” to Queen Victoria was a major feather in his cap.
The last man in London to wear a queue, a type of ponytail added to a wig, and a prodigious drinker who, “although never drunk, lost the use of his legs after the sixth bottle”, an occurrence so frequent that a special chair had to be constructed to carry him to bed, Harding died in 1851 aged eighty-nine. His shop soldiered on for a few years but had closed by 1859 when the War Office took on the premises.
As department stores continue to fight for their existence, it is timely to think of the man who first brought them to London’s streets.
