Whittard of Chelsea

Whittard of Chelsea began in 1886, when 25-year-old Walter Whittard opened a tea and coffee shop on Fleet Street with a simple operating rule: buy the best. His sons Dick and Hugh took over the business after his death in 1935, and ran it through the Blitz — the original warehouse was destroyed in the December 1940 fires, forcing a move in 1941 to Fulham Road in Chelsea, the address that eventually gave the company its name.

That relocation stuck for decades, and the Chelsea identity has outlasted the original Fleet Street site by nearly a century. In 1999 Whittard opened a flagship on Covent Garden with a tea bar serving afternoon tea on-site, extending a shop that had always sold leaves and beans into a place to sit and drink them.

The company still operates stores across the UK today, still trading as Whittard of Chelsea more than 130 years after a 25-year-old bought his first shopfront on the philosophy that quality, not scale, was the thing worth building around.