Liberty was a just a two-minute skip from my office desk: down bustling Carnaby Street, past the Chinese stone lions and the famous wooden doors, then up the central stairs to the second-floor café with its solid Arts and Crafts-style tables.
It was the year 2000. I was working for a glossy magazine in nearby Broadwick Street. Twenty five years later, the iconic department store off Regent Street is celebrating its 150th birthday.
Liberty has run like a thread through so much of my life. And I find myself flooded with memories – of early childhood shopping trips, my long-ago working life nearby, and visits with my own daughter when tiny.
Shining on: the familiar facade of Liberty, looking south from Argyll Street
The café at Liberty was where we held features meetings and met writers. The editor and I lunched there so often throughout the noughties – in those heady pre-credit crunch days – that it was basically the staff canteen. It’s also where I developed an addiction to elderflower cordial, an on-brand Liberty drink if ever there was one. En route to the café, oh! It was impossible not to pick up something. A little frippery here, a trinket there. A hand-painted mug, an enamelled bangle, a cashmere scarf.
The denim department stocked all the latest cool American brands, such as Earl and James Jeans. And tights. So many tights: bright, colourful, impossible-to-resist tights. The place was full of quirky labels, offbeat and wonderful.
One sunny morning, walking to work, I spotted a new flower stall outside the main doors. It had appeared seemingly overnight, and was run by the fabulous florist Paula Pryke. Flouncy white blooms in silvery buckets: the height of chic. Later, it would be run by Wild At Heart, who did the flowers for my wedding.
My Liberty habit went into overdrive when my daughter was a toddler. In 2006, the home accessories department went through a phase of selling knitted cakes, displayed on oversized cake stands. I bought her one each week: battenbergs, doughnuts, macarons, jam tarts, biscuits, cupcakes… She still has them all, alongside a papier mâché turtle that’s useless for anything except looking fabulous. We adore him.
Christmas tree, bonsai-style, 2019
Christmas was the peak of my obsession. Every year, obscenely early – often in August – the top floor turned into a wonderland of tree decorations. As the season crept closer,
I popped in more and more frequently to pick up a new bauble, packed in Liberty tissue – to be unwrapped by my daughter with great ceremony. Delicate glass birds with real feathers for tails and golden clips. A lilac glass droplet that remains our family favourite. Every year, when they come out – still in their purple Liberty bags – the thrill is the same.
I’ve always known that Liberty was for special things. My grandmother did her everyday shopping – washing-up bowls, pillows, plates – at her nearest department store, Peter Jones. She borrowed novels from the lending library at Harrods. But for gifts and ornaments she went to Liberty.
And carpets. Recently, I found an old business card – in a faded eau de nil – from the Liberty rugs department. It was dated 1966. On the back were prices for two largeish rugs: a silk Tabriz and a silk Kashan. My grandmother bought the slightly cheaper of the two, the Tabriz, a purplish Persian carpet, which cost her £1,350. She treated that carpet with great reverence. So anxious were we to behave properly in its presence, that my mother referred to it always as ‘the famous Persian carpet’. It was once peed on by Marcus, the family dachshund.
Pyjama tops in signature prints, 2019
While writing this piece I did a quick Bank of England inflation check. Oh my goodness! In today’s money, it turns out, that famous Persian carpet cost my grandmother the equivalent of £22,000! It lives with my cousin now. An auctioneer recently valued it at… £100. How times change.
My grandmother’s sister, my adored great-aunt Peggy, was a skilled seamstress and relied on the wondrous haberdashery. Liberty Tana Lawn cotton became blouses for adults and smocked party dresses for us children. Peggy made my first grown-up dress, for a teenage ball, of blue shot silk. I’m ashamed to say I ripped it on its very first outing. I was no better than Marcus the dachshund.
Liberty first opened in 1875. Arthur Lasenby Liberty secured a small loan from his father-in-law to sell fabrics and ornaments from the East. The store has always been dedicated to craftsmanship and became central to the Arts and Crafts and art nouveau trends. Oscar Wilde, an early fan, declared it, ‘the chosen resort of the artistic shopper’. If you were interested in fashion – especially prints – this was the place to go. Liberty’s collections have been shaped by decades of influential designers. Bernard Nevill, who worked there in the 1960s and 70s, brought a rock-and-roll edge, admired by designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, who commissioned him to create Liberty prints for Rive Gauche. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust suit, the one on the album cover, shot just around the corner in Heddon Street, was made from Nevill’s geometric-print Corbusier fabric.
Textile designer Bernard Nevill
Naturally, the store has changed a bit over the decades. The rooms have assumed new personalities, taken on new jobs: a dangerously tempting chocolate shop popped up on the ground floor facing Carnaby Street, and beauty treatment rooms on the first. But it still feels as special as it did when I first walked through the doors.
To a child, it was the sense and smell of the place that mattered to me more than the things it sold. Close my eyes now, and I can still feel beneath my feet the wooden floor: a glorious nutty brown, the boards, some parquet, not entirely even. The feel of the carved banisters. In the leaded windows, stained glass featuring tiny vignettes of people, ships and shields. And possibly my favourite things in the whole shop, the carved animals, a medieval menagerie: a frog on the stairs, a lion, an elephant, a pelican, a monkey and an owl adorning the circle around the atrium.
Most shops in the 70s were unglamorous: full of utility and strip lighting. But Liberty was different. Almost elemental. Wool, wood and cotton. It felt warm, grand and magical, as if I had wandered into a castle – a wonderfully comfortable castle, of course, with a glorious golden ship atop its roof and tall, twisting chimneys of handmade brick, inspired by the ones at Hampton Court.
David Bowie’s Liberty-print jumpsuit for Ziggy Stardust
I’ve since learnt that the shop wasn’t always like this. The place I know was completed in 1924, designed in a mock Tudor style and built with timber from two old Royal Navy ships, HMS Impregnable and HMS Hindustan.
The atriums, wood panelling and smaller rooms of the interior were meant to make it feel cosy, more like home than a shop. There are numerous working fireplaces – my favourite is covered in blue-and-white Delft tiles – and perfect little nooks.
This week I returned with my daughter, who is now 21. She hadn’t been back for some years and I thought it would be fun to see it again through her eyes. As we strolled down Argyll Street from Oxford Circus tube I looked again at the building, as though for the first time. The gold ship on the rooftop glittered in the late summer sun. As we walked through the wooden doors, past the flower stall, I set off the security alarm.
Sophia Loren’s biography signing, 1979
My handbag had been beeping in shops all day. It was getting to be quite annoying, to be honest. But the security guard restored my mood: ‘It must be your magnetic personality,’ he said with a smile.
My daughter has outgrown knitted cakes, of course. We’ve shared the spoils of the Liberty beauty advent calendar for some years now. These days she’d rather explore the fragrance lounge in the basement. So we spent a solid 30 minutes there, testing endless scents – Bibbi, Vilhelm Parfumerie, L’Artisan Parfumeur – on small white slips of paper, and drops all the way up her arm.
Next she wanted to try on some vintage fine jewellery, which pleased her immensely, and in the fashion department she fell in love with a Damson Madder skirt and a Ganni sweater featuring bananas on the front. An Isabel Marant raspberry co-ord was too expensive even to consider, but she liked it so much.
Princess Paola (later the Queen) of Belgium, shopping, 1964
Before we left I dragged my daughter upstairs, past the brand-new Topshop installation on the ground floor to the third, to see the really important stuff. I wanted to say hello to those childhood friends of mine, the carved animals. They gazed back at me, unfazed by the hubbub below. Through decades of bustle and reinvention, they keep their vigil: calm, impervious and charming.
