A century of Hatton Garden

Walk east from Farringdon Station, cross Holborn Circus, and within three minutes you are on Hatton Garden. The street is short, less than four hundred metres from end to end, but it has been the centre of London's jewellery trade for more than three hundred years.

How the trade arrived

Hatton Garden took its name from Sir Christopher Hatton, Elizabeth I's favourite courtier, who was granted the land in the 1570s. For the first century after his death the area was residential. The jewellery trade began to concentrate here in the late 1600s, when skilled diamond cutters fleeing religious persecution in Antwerp and Amsterdam settled in Clerkenwell. Proximity mattered in the cutting trade, cutters, polishers, and dealers needed to be within walking distance of one another, and once a cluster formed, it grew.

By the late nineteenth century, De Beers had opened an office here. The London Diamond Bourse, where stones are still traded today, was founded in 1940 a few doors down. The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, which is responsible for the London Assay Office, sits at Goldsmiths' Hall on Foster Lane, a short walk south. Four centuries of cutting, setting, and hallmarking have layered themselves into the same few streets.

The Goldsmiths' Centre

In 2012 the Goldsmiths' Company opened the Goldsmiths' Centre on Britton Street, a purpose-built home for goldsmiths, silversmiths, and jewellers at every stage of their career. It houses apprenticeship programmes, workshops, and studios for working makers. Hatton Garden Bespoke Jewellery is based here. We work at bench alongside apprentices, master goldsmiths, and engravers, in a building dedicated to keeping the trade alive.

What Hatton Garden is today

There are roughly three hundred jewellery businesses in the quarter now. Some are retail. Many are trade-only: dealers who supply stones to the industry, casters whose clients never visit the showroom, hand-engravers who take commissions by email only. The concentration is a quiet kind of infrastructure. Walk three minutes from our bench and you will find a cutter who will recut a stone to your specification, a setter who will take on a platinum tension-set commission most jewellers turn down, and an engraver whose script you have seen on signet rings without ever knowing his name.

Why the concentration matters

The economics of bespoke jewellery depend on this geography. A commission that involves a natural emerald-cut sapphire, a platinum bezel setting, a hand-engraved inner shank, and a London hallmark can be started on a Monday and collected the following Friday, because every specialist involved is within a ten-minute walk of our workshop. Courier a stone across London and you add a day. Courier it to Birmingham and you add three. For urgent commissions, engagement rings for proposals booked three weeks out, eternity rings needed for an anniversary next month, Hatton Garden's density is the difference between possible and not.

What it means for the pieces we make

Every ring we make passes through this ecosystem. The diamond is often chosen from a dealer around the corner. The casting is done by a foundry we have worked with for twenty-five years, two streets away. The setting happens at our bench. The hallmark is applied at Goldsmiths' Hall, ten minutes' walk south. The final polish happens back at the bench on Britton Street.

By the time a piece reaches a client's hand, it has travelled perhaps a kilometre, in total, and passed through the hands of four or five specialists, each of whom has been working in this square mile for decades.

That is what “handcrafted in Hatton Garden” means on one of our pieces. Not a postcode for the website. A working ecosystem.