Green & Stone

Green & Stone began in 1927, when Alfred Green and his sons Alfie and Peter were invited to work out of the Chenil Gallery on Chelsea's King's Road by the gallery's own directors, Augustus John and Bernard Shaw. In 1934 the business moved five minutes away to 259 King's Road — a shop that had previously housed the Women's Suffragette Movement — where, under the Greens, it operated mainly as a picture-framing business with only a small sideline in art materials. That balance shifted after 1972, when Rodney Baldwin joined as a trainee manager and bought the business from the Green family in 1978; under his ownership the framing department kept its focus on handmade frames while the art-materials side grew into the shop's larger business. Deteriorating premises and flooding forced a further move in 2018 to the current address at 251-253 Fulham Road.

Today Green & Stone stocks oil paint from Michael Harding, Sennelier, Winsor & Newton and Charvin alongside watercolours, acrylics, pastels, technical drawing supplies, canvas and stretchers, framing services, an in-house gallery and art classes — a range broad enough that the business describes itself as one of the largest fine-art-materials retailers in Europe.

What the size doesn't erase is the sequence of hand-offs that got it there: a gallery-invited framing shop, folded into a suffragette storefront, carried through a change of family ownership, and rebuilt once more after its building failed under it — the same trade, four addresses and three owners deep.