Harrods, Department store in Knightsbridge, London, United Kingdom
Harrods is a department store on Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, London, built between 1894 and 1903 in eclectic style to designs by C. W. Stephens for Charles Digby Harrod and opened in 1905, replacing the store on the site that burned in 1883. Its pale brown stone facade rises in tiers of arched windows between carved columns, crowned by a rounded stone dome with a slender finial, with green awnings bearing the name in white script above the ground floor. Inside, more than 330 departments occupy over one million square feet of selling space, including the Art Nouveau Food Halls on the ground floor.
Charles Henry Harrod began trading in 1824 at 228 Borough High Street, Southwark, as a draper and later grocer; in 1834 he opened a wholesale grocery at 4 Cable Street, Stepney, specialising in tea. In 1849 he took over a small Brompton shop on the site of the present store, which his son Charles Digby Harrod expanded to employ 100 people by 1881. A fire destroyed the store in December 1883, and the present building by C. W. Stephens opened in 1905.
The ground-floor Food Halls are fitted out in Art Nouveau style, and the store's motto, "Omnia Omnibus Ubique" (all things for all people, everywhere), sums up its range. Harrods held royal warrants from Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Charles and the Queen Mother until 2001, when the warrants were withdrawn and the coats of arms taken down from the facade.
Knightsbridge Underground Station on the Piccadilly Line is the nearest stop, and a separately signposted subway entrance on Hans Crescent, a street calmed since 2004, leads directly to one of the store's entrances. Security staff ask visitors to carry backpacks in the hand rather than on the back, and entry is through one of four doors.
The building housed England's first escalator in 1898, and staff waited at the top to offer brandy to customers shaken by the new moving staircase. Each evening at dusk, around 12,000 individual bulbs switch on together to trace the outline of the facade, turning the building into a landmark visible from a distance.
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