Harrods

HARRODS

Harrods is one of largest departments stores in the world and also one of the oldest. The original shop was situated in Eastcheap, in The City Of London, which was opened by a tea merchant, Charles Henry Harrod, in 1834. He moved the store in 1849, to a single room, in what was then the village of Knightsbridge, partly to capitalise on the forthcoming ‘Great Exhibition’ due to be held in the nearby Hyde Park in 1851.

The store flourished and grew until it was destroyed by fire in 1883. Extraordinarily, despite being raised to the ground, all orders were honoured within three working days. In retrospect, the fire was seen as a blessing in disguise, with a vast new building, covering four and a half acres, finally completed by 1905 and still standing to this very day. Built in the ‘High Victorian’ style, with visible Art Nouveau influences, seen from the elegant shop windows to the stylized ‘H’s for Harrods, positioned at the bases of the many pilasters.

The exterior of the store is illuminated at night by over 15,000 light bulbs and the national flags of countries from across the four compass points of the world wave on the sides of the building and from high up on the roof. Inside, nine hundred customer attendants work in three hundred departments, serving, at peak periods, up to a staggering three hundred thousand customers a day. It is said to be the only department store in the world to have an annual turnover of in excess of one billion pounds sterling.

The very first escalator in the United kingdom was installed in Harrods in 1898 and the shoppers were so afraid of its new technology, that a man with one leg was employed to travel up and down the escalator all day, simply to reassure the nervous customers. At the height of his popularity, Oscar Wilde was a regular customer and Harrods has served everybody from the modest middle classes, to the last Tsar of Russia and the British Royal Family. However, the four vast Royal Warrants displayed above the store’s entrance have all been removed, one after the death of The Queen Mother, the remaining three allegedly connected with the well documented events surrounding the death of The Princess of Wales in 1997.

Be careful what you wear into the store, a story once circulated about a girl who bought a pair of designer ripped jeans in Harrods, she later wore them back into the store and was refused entry by doormen, for being dressed too scruffily. If you do get past the entrance staff, the Egyptian Hall awaits and do visit the splendid food hall. After tiring of shopping, there are restaurants on every floor, said to number twenty-eight in total, including a highly rated oyster bar.

If you are more accustomed to shopping in a ‘pound store’, then the cost of two and half kilos of beluga caviar may came as a shock. It is no surprise then, that the store is said to take up to fifteen million pounds a day. Indeed, the Harrods boss was taking dividends of seven hundred thousand pounds a week at the height of the boom in 2007. The owner is the well known Mohammed Al Fayed, together with his publicity shy brother, who together purchased the store in 1985 for 615 million pounds. The purchase made for much controversy, as the rival bidder Tiny Rowland insisted Al Fayed had lied and cheated his way to winning the battle for the store. Tiny Rowland fought Al Fayed more or less up to his death in 1998, even accusing the Egyptian of stealing items from his Harrods safe deposit box.

Dubbed the ‘Phoney Pharaoh’ by his critics, the more he has tried to join the British establishment, the more Al Fayed has apparently been cold-shouldered. His relationship with the Harrods staff is said to be equally at odds, newspapers reported that he regularly addresses the five thousand employees over the in-store public address system and allegedly, even telling staff which way to vote in an election. Allegedly, secret recording equipment was hidden inside fire extinguishers, not so much to observe shoplifters, but in order to keep an eye on his own floor staff.

It cannot be denied that over his twenty-five years of ownership, Mohammed Al Fayed has shown dedication to the world famous store. Sometimes he has even been known to take on a hands-on role, sometimes serving customers fish in the food hall, or sweating beneath heavy boxes in the storage rooms. Al Fayed rarely misses a trick, the Harrods bank has been selling gold bars since late 2009, cashing in on the demand for gold with its surging prices.

During its long history it hasn’t always been rosy, as besides the aforementioned fire, terrorists attacked the store with a car bomb in 1983 and six people were murdered. Also, anti fur trade demonstrators,  a familiar thorn in the side of the retail business as a whole, which is not always known for its ethics, have regular protests outside the store, with verbal clashes allegedly occasionally spilling over to violence.  Finally, inside the store are two memorials dedicated to the memory of the lives of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed, son of Mohammed, a reminder to a very painful and dramatic series of events for the Harrods owner.

Harrods

87-135 Brompton Road

Knightsbridge SW3 1RT

Nearest London Underground Station (tube):  Knightsbridge

Where to view Harrods  and video clips of London

London in motion has some of the best London Stock Footage and London Library Footage with moving clips of many of the above mentioned places to see, are available to browse through by simply visiting the ‘Harrods’ category of this website.  New additions of London video clips are being frequently uploaded and further categories will be appearing over the coming months.