Harrods in the early evening

Harrods is a high-end department store located on Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, United Kingdom. The Harrods brand also applies to other enterprises undertaken by the Harrods group of companies including Harrods Bank, Harrods Estates, Harrods Aviation and Air Harrods, and Harrods Buenos Aires.

The store occupies a .5-acre (2,000 m2) site and has over one million square feet (90,000 m2) of selling space in over 330 departments. The UK’s second-biggest shop, Oxford Street’s Selfridges, is a little over half the size with 540,000-square-foot (50,000 m2) of selling space.[1]
The Harrods motto is Omnia Omnibus Ubique—All Things for All People, Everywhere. Several of its departments, including the seasonal Christmas department and the Food Hall, are world famous.
Throughout its history, the store has changed hands several times. Most recently, on 8 May 2010, Mohamed Al-Fayed sold the store to Qatar Holdings for a sum of £1.5 billion.[2]

Fashion plate of 1909 shows upper-class Londoners walking in front of Harrods Harrods founder Charles Henry Harrod first set up shop in 1824,at the age of 25, south of the River Thames in Southwark, at 228, Borough High Street. He ran this business, variously listed as a Draper, or Mercer and Haberdasher, certainly until 1831.[3][4][5] During 1825 the business was listed as ‘Harrod and Wicking, Linen Drapers, Retail’,[6] but this partnership was dissolved at the end of that year.[7] His first grocery business appears to be as ‘Harrod & Co.Grocers’ at 163 Upper Whitecross Street, Clerkenwell, E.C.1., in 1832.[8] In 1834 in London’s East End, he established a wholesale grocery in Stepney, at 4, Cable Street, with a special interest in tea. In 1849, to escape the vice of the inner city and to capitalise on trade to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in nearby Hyde Park, Harrod took over a small shop in the district of Knightsbridge, on the site of the current store. Beginning in a single room employing two assistants and a messenger boy, Harrod’s son Charles Digby Harrod built the business into a thriving retail operation selling medicines, perfumes, stationery, fruit, and vegetables. Harrods rapidly expanded, acquired the adjoining buildings, and employed one hundred people by 1880.
However, the store’s booming fortunes were reversed in early December 1883, when it burnt to the ground. Remarkably, in view of this calamity, Charles Harrod fulfilled all of his commitments to his customers to make Christmas deliveries that year—and made a record profit in the process. In short order, a new building was raised on the same site, and soon Harrods extended credit for the first time to its best customers, among them Oscar Wilde, legendary actors Lillie Langtry and Ellen Terry, Noël Coward, Sigmund Freud, A. A. Milne, and many members of the British Royal Family.

On Wednesday, 16 November 1898, Harrods debuted England’s first "moving staircase" (escalator) in their Brompton road stores; the device was actually a woven leather conveyor belt-like unit with a mahogany and "silver plate-glass" balustrade.[9] Nervous customers were offered brandy at the top to revive them after their ‘ordeal’. The department store was purchased by the Fayed brothers in 1985.
Source: wikipedia.com

Posted by recherche2008 on 2009-04-23 22:37:54

Tagged: , London , 2008