James J. Fox

James J. Fox traces its lineage to two joined businesses: Robert Lewis, which began trading tobacco in 1787 at 14 Long Acre, Covent Garden, only moving to its present St James's Street address decades later, and James J. Fox, formed in Dublin in 1881. James J. Fox opened its first London shop in 1947 and acquired Robert Lewis outright on 14 September 1992, uniting the two houses at 19 St James's Street, where the business still trades today. Between them the two names collected seven royal warrants; the first, per the company's own heritage page, was granted by Queen Victoria (independently dated to around 1850), and the last came in 1997 from Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

The shop sells Cuban and international cigars, pipes and premium pipe tobacco, alongside cigar accessories such as humidors, cutters and lighters, and holds concession departments inside Harrods and Selfridges. Its basement houses the Freddie Fox Museum, named for Frederic James Fox, who led the business through the twentieth century and established what the company describes as the world's first duty-free tobacco outlet. The museum displays the company's historic sales ledgers, Sir Winston Churchill's cigar cases, and what is presented as the oldest surviving box of Havana cigars, dated 1851.

Recorded customers across the shop's history include Churchill, Oscar Wilde, and members of British and foreign royal families, documented in the surviving ledgers now kept on site. The current premises at 19 St James's Street sit a short walk from Piccadilly in London's traditional gentlemen's-shopping quarter, and the business continues to trade as a dedicated cigar and pipe tobacconist rather than a general tobacco retailer.