There’s a shop in London that was a hundred years old when my country was born.
And it’s still selling hats.
London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
Now, today we’re going to your head.
Or rather, we’re going to the people who’ve been going to people’s heads for three hundred and fifty years.
Lock & Co.
The hatters.
Number 6, St James’s Street.
The oldest hat shop in the world.
And this year, 2026, its three hundred and fiftieth birthday.
Think about that.
When this business started, Charles II was on the throne.
London was only ten years on from the Great Fire.
St Paul’s Cathedral, the one we know, was a building project.
And somewhere in St James’s Street, somebody was trying on a hat.
I find that very pleasing.
All that history. All that upheaval. Kings coming and going. Wars. Revolutions. Empires rising and falling.
And the continuing question: does this one suit me?
Now, I should declare an interest.
I have a couple of Lock’s hats.
The most recent, a Fairbanks trilby.
My favourite hat.
So this is personal. There’s a bit of me under that brim.
Martha, who designs men’s hats at Lock’s, describes the Fairbanks as a “Goldilocks hat”.
Just right.
It’s a hat for everybody.
And yes, everybody apparently includes a vintage American London Walks guide.
Still in working order.
And very pleased with his Fairbanks.
Martha’s a hatter, incidentally.
The usual distinction is that a hatter makes or designs men’s hats. A milliner makes or designs women’s hats.
And Martha’s older brother Maxwell is the shop manager.
We know Maxwell because Lock’s is always a port of call on our Friday afternoon Old Palace Quarter walk.
Sometimes we go inside.
And Maxwell shows our walkers round.
That’s a London door worth going through.
Outside, you’ve got St James’s Street. The palace down at the bottom. Clubs. Wine merchants. That extraordinary concentration of old London establishments.
Inside, you’ve got hats.
And the people who know what to do with them.
Which matters.
Because buying a hat is a slightly more intimate undertaking than buying a packet of biscuits.
You’re going to wear the thing on your head.
Right above your face.
It’s going to introduce you before you’ve opened your mouth.
Now, the Fairbanks is named after Douglas Fairbanks Junior.
The actor. Who lived above the shop.
There’s a London arrangement to savour.
Hollywood upstairs.
Hats downstairs.
If you needed to look debonair in a hurry, you didn’t have far to go.
And somewhere in this wonderful establishment is what’s reputed to be London’s oldest cat flap.
Naturally.
Not to mention a brothel at the back.
And a coffin staircase.
Forget for now those last two. Let’s tarry over the cat flap.
All those distinguished human customers. All those fittings. All that care over who looks good in what.
And the cat gets its own entrance.
No appointment. No fitting. No interest whatsoever in whether you’ve got a Royal Warrant.
You’ve probably guessed, I’ve been reading about Lock’s in Nigel Cope’s fine book, The Great Survivors.
And what I like about his account is that he gets behind the lovely shopfront.
Because three hundred and fifty years in business doesn’t happen just because you’ve got a splendid past.
You have to keep giving people a reason to come through the door.
And Lock’s hasn’t always had an easy ride.
There were years when men fell out of love with hats.
They went bareheaded. They discovered new hairstyles. The old expectation that a man went out properly hatted began to disappear.
Imagine owning a hat shop while the country gradually decides it likes the top of its head just as it is.
By the nineteen-seventies, the hat market was awful.
By the late nineteen-eighties, Lock’s itself was in serious financial trouble.
It could have gone under.
The two families behind the business rallied round and put their own money into saving it.
Which they did.
And then came the harder part.
Making a very old shop somewhere new customers wanted to be.
You can have hatted Churchill.
You can have hatted Nelson.
You can have hatted half the establishment.
But Churchill isn’t coming in next Saturday.
Somebody else has to.
And that somebody must feel welcome.
That’s where people like Maxwell and Martha come in.
The living people. Today’s people. The people who make the door open both ways.
Now, let me give you a couple of the stories behind that door.
First, the fitting.
For a structured hat, something like a top hat or a bowler or a fedora, getting the circumference right isn’t the whole job.
Heads have shapes.
Your head and my head might measure the same distance round and still be rather different pieces of equipment.
So Lock’s uses a device called a conformateur.
A nineteenth-century French invention.
Look at it and you might hesitate.
It looks as though somebody’s taken a top hat apart and found a small mechanical octopus inside.
But its job is benevolent.
It records the contours of your head and produces a little paper pattern.
Your own personal cranial geography.
And Lock’s has kept patterns belonging to famous customers.
Which is a wonderfully peculiar way to encounter celebrity.
Forget the autograph.
Here’s the shape of the head that thought the thoughts.
And then there’s Oscar Wilde.
Wilde bought a black fedora from Lock’s for his American lecture tour in 1882.
Later, when he was in prison, he couldn’t pay his final hat bill.
Now, move forward to the year 2000.
An admirer reads about the outstanding debt and sends Lock’s a cheque.
Three pounds thirty.
To settle Oscar Wilde’s account.
A century after Wilde’s death, somebody is still looking after him.
Still wanting to put something right.
And Lock’s didn’t bank the cheque.
They kept it.
That little story gets me.
The bill survives.
The affection survives.
And the cheque becomes something worth preserving.
Then there’s the repair room.
Because a good hat can become a companion.
You’ve worn it places. It’s been rained on. Knocked about. Pulled down against the wind.
Eventually it needs attention.
A lining. A ribbon. Some careful work to give it another stretch of life.
And for spare parts, Lock’s keeps old hats in boxes.
The boxes are labelled “organ donors”.
I love that.
Somewhere in St James’s, a much-loved hat is getting a transplant.
A bit of ribbon from here. Something useful from there.
And back out into London it goes.
Ready for another adventure.
That, for me, is the pleasure of this place.
The history is still being handled. Fitted. Brushed. Repaired.
You can walk through the door.
You can meet Maxwell.
You can talk hats with Martha.
You can try one on and look in the mirror.
And perhaps discover that the person looking back at you has been waiting for that hat for years.
I found mine.
The Fairbanks.
The Goldilocks hat.
Three hundred and fifty years of experience.
And somehow they’ve managed to get the last few inches right.
The inches above my eyebrows.
Happy birthday, Lock’s.
And from this very contented customer, there’s only one possible sign-off.
Hats off.
See you tomorrow.