Walk into Liberty from Great Marlborough Street and it is difficult to separate the shop from the idea of Liberty itself. Dark timber, small rooms, fireplaces and galleries make it feel very different from the great open-plan department stores elsewhere in central London. Even before you look at what is being sold, the building is doing some of the storytelling.
That made it an appropriate setting for a recent London Society event marking Liberty’s 150th anniversary. Our members joined Genevieve Bennett, Head of Design for Interiors & Home, for a look at The House of Liberty, the latest interiors collection, and an introduction to the extraordinary archive behind it.
There was plenty of oohing and ahhing over fabrics and wallpapers, but some of the most interesting conversations were about what sits behind them. How does a business founded in Victorian London remain recognisably itself when the city, its customers and the markets it sells to have changed almost beyond recognition?
For Liberty, part of the answer appears to be unusually literal. It keeps going back to what it already has.
Arthur Lasenby Liberty opened his first shop on Regent Street in 1875, after working for Farmer & Rogers. The international outlook associated with the company today was there remarkably early.
Liberty developed an extensive network through which goods could be sourced from around the world. In 1889, Arthur travelled to Japan himself and spent a record amount sourcing items for the store. Japanese textiles, craftsmanship and decorative arts became closely associated with the emerging Liberty aesthetic.
The exchange also belongs to a much wider London story. The city’s creative identity has rarely developed in isolation. Ideas and objects arrive here from elsewhere, are absorbed into the life of the city and sometimes travel out again in a form that has become distinctly associated with London.
Liberty’s fabrics arrived at a moment when ideas about dress were changing too. The Dress Reform movement sought healthier and more comfortable clothing, particularly for women, challenging the corsetry and heavily structured garments of conventional Victorian fashion.
Soft, flowing Liberty fabrics lent themselves to this different silhouette and found favour among artistic women including the actress Ellen Terry. Fabric was not responsible for changing women’s lives, of course, but what was available to buy could enable different choices about how people presented themselves in the city.
Today Liberty holds an archive of around 65,000 pieces. A smaller collection remains at its London headquarters, with the larger archive stored outside the capital.
More unusual is how accessible that history is to the people designing for Liberty now. Around 90 per cent of the archive is available to the design studio through a bespoke digital database.
During our visit, we saw what that means in practice. Designers do not necessarily retrieve an old pattern and reproduce it. They might take a colour or a single motif, alter the scale or combine elements from different references. Sometimes the relationship between old and new only becomes obvious when the two are put side by side.
The archive is a source rather than a constraint. Liberty’s artists also create new, original artworks for its collections, adding material that may itself become part of the archive future designers inherit.
For the 150th anniversary, Liberty’s Ianthe design has been given a new gold interpretation. Even the company’s early visual identity survives in unexpected places: a printing block depicting a lotus flower used in one of Liberty’s original logos is now held in the V&A’s collection at Storehouse in east London.
With 90 per cent of those 65,000 pieces accessible to its designers, the archive functions as a working resource rather than simply a record of the company’s past.
In the 1960s and 70s, pioneering Liberty designer Bernard Nevill helped reposition the company’s textiles for another generation. One of his designs, then called Frieze, was worn by Twiggy in Vogue.
The setting could hardly have been further from Victorian Dress Reform. Twiggy belonged to a new image of London being circulated around the world through fashion, photography, music and magazines, and Liberty found itself part of that London too.
Frieze has since been reimagined as Prospect Road. A design associated with one period of London fashion has been returned to the archive and brought out again for another.
Liberty’s Tudor Revival store opened in 1924 and has become such a familiar part of central London that it is easy to forget how peculiar it is.
HMS Hindustan and HMS Impregnable provided timber associated with its construction, while the woodwork for the store was made at Liberty’s own workshop in Archway.
Inside, the smaller rooms and fireplaces allowed merchandise to be shown in domestic settings rather than across an anonymous shop floor. Shopping for the home could take place in spaces that suggested the home.
A century later, those choices still shape a visit to Liberty and distinguish it from much of the international retail surrounding it. The building itself has become part of the attraction.
Our own event took place in the wood-panelled Heritage Suite, originally the boardroom and now used for meetings and events, as well as taking on a rather different role as the Christmas grotto.
The contemporary design process extends well beyond Great Marlborough Street. Genevieve described a production network involving specialist interiors manufacturers in Britain, Italy, India and Belgium. Liberty also owns the printing mill in northern Italy where its Tana Lawn cotton has been printed for generations.
What was particularly interesting was the relationship between designer and manufacturer. A completed London design is not simply dispatched elsewhere to be reproduced. Materials, specialist knowledge and manufacturing techniques can change what is possible, so the design continues to develop through conversations between Liberty’s London team and the people who will make it.
Moving a pattern between different parts of Liberty brings similar decisions. Something originally designed for fashion cannot necessarily be enlarged and printed onto an interiors fabric. The repeat might need to change, or the colour and scale adjusted to work on a curtain, wall or sofa rather than a dress.
Liberty is experimenting with the material itself too. Waste Tana Lawn cotton is being transformed into Tana Reborn, a recycled fibre spun into new yarn and woven into materials for fashion and interiors. The resulting material contains 28 per cent recycled cotton and has already been used for interior fabrics including Paisley Willow and Grand Thorpe.
It is an interesting addition to a design process already accustomed to returning to existing material and finding another use for it.
Arthur Liberty travelled overseas to find things he thought his London customers might want. Today’s Liberty is also taking its designs in the other direction, finding new audiences for a brand still closely associated with the city where it began.
That increasingly happens through different kinds of international presence rather than simply exporting fabric from London. Liberty Home, for example, has opened in Msheireb Downtown Doha, bringing the interiors collection to customers in Qatar.
There is a pleasing connection with Arthur Liberty’s journey to Japan in 1889. The early business brought international influences into London. Today, Liberty is also working out how something strongly associated with London translates elsewhere.
The early Liberty customer was relatively affluent. Much of what fills the store today remains an investment, particularly when buying interiors fabrics in the quantities required to furnish a room.
The ways into the brand have expanded, however. Wallpaper and stationery sit at very different price points from a fully upholstered room. Collaborations with Ruggable, Vinterior and Farrow & Ball also put Liberty designs in front of people who may encounter them somewhere other than Great Marlborough Street.
Prospect Mural offers another example of how the format itself can change. The panoramic wallpaper has been designed in panels that can accommodate different spaces, but some customers, we were told, have selected individual sections and framed them instead.
There is an obvious commercial calculation here for a 150-year-old company with a highly recognisable identity: finding new customers without making the thing they are buying feel ubiquitous. Liberty’s approach has been to create more ways to encounter and buy its designs.
The House of Liberty marks the company’s 150th anniversary, but much of what we saw during our visit was rooted in earlier versions of Liberty.
Old designs have acquired different colours and scales, while new artworks continue to be created. Fashion prints have moved into interiors. Bernard Nevill’s work has returned in another form. Even waste fabric has found its way back into the production process.
The capital has lost plenty of businesses that once seemed inseparable from particular streets and neighbourhoods. Liberty still occupies its extraordinary 1924 store, while the work taking place behind that familiar façade now involves a digitised archive and an international network of customers and manufacturers.
Arthur Liberty would recognise very little of the London outside his shop today. He might, however, recognise the habit of looking beyond it for the next idea.
Our exploration of London’s interiors continues this autumn with a London Society visit to Maison Colbert, where members will have another opportunity to look behind the scenes at craftsmanship, interiors and the continuing life of a historic London building.
The London Society would like to thank Liberty, Genevieve Bennett and the Liberty team for hosting our members and sharing the company’s archive and design story with us.
Image credit: Liberty
