Heart of oak are our shops
… well, actually »our ships« is the correct version of the song, but perhaps the Royal Navy will forgive this paraphrase of its official march, as Liberty is almost literally a flagship store. In the 1920s, when the shop had outgrown its premises on Regent Street, an extension was built around the corner in Great Marlborough Street using timber from its two last wooden warships, HMS Impregnable and HMS Hindustan.
By this time, the department store founded by Arthur Lasenby Liberty in 1875 had long been an institution in London, and had even made its mark on the international art scene: »Stile Liberty«, the Italian expression for Art Nouveau, is derived from the style that the store championed. Liberty worked with leading designers of the Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau movements to create furniture, lamps, carpets and clothes that expressed modern lifestyle in the late 19th century. The company’s proprietary textile patterns from that period are still popular on cushions, curtains, bags, men’s ties, and a host of other items.
Info
Address 210–220 Regent Street, W1B 5AH | Public Transport Oxford Circus (Bakerloo, Central, Victoria Line) | Hours Mon–Sat 10am–8pm, Sun noon–6pm| Tip A walk along crowded Oxford Street and Regent Street is hard work, but from the top deck of a bus you can either look down on the retail scrum or up at opulent shop fronts that were built to impress with mosaics, carved stone and metalwork.
The 1920s façade, the length of HMS Hindustan, is a charming piece of architectural nostalgia in half-timbered, black-and-white Tudor Revival style. Naval timbers were also recycled inside the shop as wooden panelling. Three roofed courtyards with galleries on four storeys around a light well recreate the atmosphere of a historic inn or a comfortable country house. There are leaded windows and stone fireplaces, woodcarvings on the door frames and balustrades, a hammer-beam roof and even linen-fold panelling in the lifts. The fabrics department is legendary, the carpet department an Aladdin’s cave. However, Liberty is not a museum, but remains an innovative company that collaborates with 21st-century designers such as the cross-dressing ceramic artist Grayson Perry and exploits its unsinkable brand name to the full.
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