A century of Hatton Garden

From Farringdon Station, cross Farringdon Road, walk along Greville Street, and within a few minutes you are on Hatton Garden. The street is short, but it is the centre of London’s jewellery trade.

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. Later, the jewellery trade began to concentrate here. 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. 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 itself a 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 made within our usual three to four weeks from CAD approval. Courier a stone across London and you add a day. Courier it to Birmingham and you add three. Urgent commissions, such as engagement rings for proposals booked three weeks out or eternity rings needed for an anniversary next month, can sometimes be accommodated for a significant additional fee, quoted before we begin.

Density only buys you time if the design is settled before the bench work begins. The Ring Studio starts with the setting and comes to the diamond after it, and shows each setting in the shape and metal you choose, so the specification is fixed before anything is ordered.

What it means for the pieces we make

Every ring we make passes through these streets. The diamond is sourced to the brief. The casting is done by a specialist casting workshop we have worked with for years. The setting is done by hand by a specialist setter we work with. 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 passed through the hands of four or five specialists.

That is what “handcrafted in Hatton Garden” means on one of our pieces.