Liberty turns 150 this year, and its distinctive mock-Tudor façade remains a beacon on Regent Street for shoppers and designers alike. Harriet Green, who first wandered through its doors near Carnaby Street in 2000 while writing features for a glossy magazine, writes about how the store has threaded through her family's past and present.
In its early years Liberty was founded in 1875 by Arthur Lasenby Liberty as a shop focused on fabrics and East inspired ornaments. The store quickly became a hub for craftsmen and designers, helping to shape Arts and Crafts and art nouveau trends. Oscar Wilde was among its early aficionados, calling it the chosen resort of the artistic shopper. Over decades, Liberty’s rooms and screens have carried new personalities: the interiors later hosted a chocolate shop on the ground floor and beauty treatment rooms on the first, while maintaining a sense of cozy grandeur.
The building itself is a landmark. In 1924, Liberty was completed in a mock-Tudor style and built with timber from two old Royal Navy ships, HMS Impregnable and HMS Hindustan. The interior’s atriums, wood panelling, and smaller rooms were designed to feel like a home rather than a shop, with working fireplaces and Delft-tiled walls. An imagined stroll through the floors features carved animal figures that decorate the atrium circle — a frog, a lion, an elephant, a pelican, a monkey and an owl — memories that remain vivid for regulars and first-timers alike. The roof bears a gilded ship, a reminder of Liberty’s maritime inspirations and its maker’s appetite for theater in retail.
For Green, Liberty’s influence extends beyond its design. Her recollections trace a constant loop of purchases and moments: a coffee table, a hand-painted mug, a cashmere scarf, the denim department’s cool American labels, and an ever-present supply of tights that felt written into her life. The store’s ritual began with a morning stroll past a flower stall outside the doors, once a pausing point for Paula Pryke, the florist who had a hand in weddings years later. The first Liberty habit began with a stroll that led to a new object, each finding a story to tether to the family. A phase in the home accessories department in 2006 featured knitted cakes on oversized stands; Green bought a cake every week for her young daughter, a ritual that continues in memory alongside a papier-mâché turtle the child still keeps. The family’s Christmas tradition grew around liberties of the season, with tree decorations gathered from August onward and packed in Liberty tissue paper, awaiting ceremony on the top floor.
What is known outside Green’s piece is Liberty’s evolving role in the fashion and design worlds. The store’s prints have long shaped designer wardrobes and even touched pop culture: Bernard Nevill, who worked there in the 1960s and 70s, brought a rock-and-roll edge; Yves Saint Laurent sought out Liberty’s fabrics for Rive Gauche. The Ziggy Stardust suit worn by David Bowie, created from Nevill’s geometric-print Corbusier fabric, is a well-known anecdote tied to the area’s creative energy. The store’s rooms today host a chocolate counter and beauty lounges, while its core mission remains the celebration of craftsmanship, textiles, and artful design.
In recent years Green has revisited the building with her daughter, now 21, to see how Liberty reads to a new generation. They walk from Oxford Circus up Argyll Street, through the familiar doors, past the flower stall, and into a world where the fragrance lounge sits downstairs and vintage jewelry glints in the basement. The daughter enjoys a modern Damson Madder skirt, a Ganni banana-print sweater, and Isabel Marant textiles that feel both timeless and of the moment. Yet the ritual remains intimate: the trip upstairs to greet the carved animals who have watched the building’s life for decades, a reminder that the store’s most enduring appeal lies not just in what it sells but in what it represents a living archive that keeps turning as new generations enter.
So Liberty’s 150th year is not solely a milestone of commercial success; it is a celebration of memory and material culture. For families like Green’s, Liberty serves as a private gallery: a place where a grandmother’s Persian carpet, purchased in 1966 for the equivalent of roughly £22,000 today, sits beside a dachshund’s misadventure and a child’s first party dress, alongside a Ziggy Stardust era fabric that linked fashion, music, and art. The carpet’s story and its later appraisal at a mere hundred pounds is a reminder of changing times and the fragile economies of fashion and luxury. The carpet lives with a cousin now, a symbol of a lineage that Liberty has sustained through design, craft, and ritual. The public is reminded that the store acts as a living archive that keeps turning as generations arrive.
Looking ahead, the store’s blend of old world craft and contemporary taste suggests Liberty will continue to function as both destination and memory-maker. The building itself with its ship on the roof and its oak and wood interiors remains a site where the past and present of British fashion and design interweave. As Green’s daughter points out during their latest visit, Liberty remains a place where shopping becomes storytelling, and where a child’s imagination can be shaped by a carved owl or a delicate glass bird, a reminder that the store’s magic endures in the everyday as much as in the extraordinary. The 150th anniversary thus marks not simply a retrospective, but a continuing thread: a family’s past, a city’s design language, and a culture that keeps evolving around Liberty doors.