The first time I went to Liberty, back when London was declining and futurism was all the rage, I wasn’t certain I was in a shop at all. It was so quiet compared with the department stores of nearby Oxford Street. So refined. Had I wandered into someone’s stately home?
I now know that I had entered a giant architectural confection, but also an emporium of deluxe design. The Liberty building, a vast Tudor Revival novelty on Great Marlborough Street, was completed in 1924 and became the core of Arthur Lasenby Liberty’s retail enterprise, superseding its premises on Regent Street where, from 1875, Liberty had sold an expanding array of fabrics and arty objects from places known as “the Orient” or “the Far East” and nurtured pioneers of Art Nouveau. “Liberty’s is the chosen resort of the artistic shopper,” wrote Oscar Wild.
The business has been celebrating its 150th anniversary with an exhibition on its fourth floor – Friday is its last day, so be quick – and also savouring its survival of the pandemic, which not every West End shopping institution did. To enter it via, for example, its flower entrance, is to penetrate a milieu where picking out quality curtains or selecting a superior sofa is not a just a transaction, but a leisurely affirmation of what still counts as good taste despite decades of siege by vulgarity. Frocks, fragrances, crockery for dining al fresco? Everything for a certain school of discernment is there.
This makes me fonder of the fakery of the building. True, its timbers possess a stout authority, having previously been part of a pair of battleships, the HMS Impregnable and the HMS Hindustan. Even so, the vision of Edwin Thomas Hall and his son, Edwin Stanley Hall, was a posh sort of mock, a grand, manorial rendering of a style that would become seen as the height of suburban naff. Tudor Revival was fashionable at the time but, as remarked below, though the building was supposed to represent the craft values and gracious aesthetics of Liberty himself, it “doesn’t quite”.
It is, in fact, a steel and concrete construction behind a teak facade to make it look not even actually Tudor but Medieval. Nikolaus Pevsner, the revered architectural historian, said everything about it was wrong, from its scale, to its symmetry to its phoney “twisted chimneys”.
Probably right, but so what? The monstrosity isn’t going anywhere and would be missed if it did. The founder of Liberty did not live to see it finished, having died in 1917, and was therefore spared having to endure the ridicule of its detractors. The interior, though, is a different story: all wood, balconies and gracious detail. The anniversary exhibition honours the work of, among others, Liberty designer Bernard Nevill. Catch it if you can. But if you miss it, Liberty will stick around.
Buy John Vane’s London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here or here. Subscribe to his Substack too.