The jewellery trade has been in my family for more than a century”, says Robert Ogden, who runs Richard Ogden, the traditional English jewellers in the Burlington Arcade off Piccadilly. “As a consequence, I have quite simply lived, breathed and dreamed jewellery since childhood.”
Jewellery has been the lifeblood of the Ogden family for four generations. James R. Ogden opened the first Ogden family jewellery shop in 1893. A master jeweller and watch specialist, he soon established the Ogden tradition of expert customer relations and his “Little Diamond Shop” fast grew popular with illustrious clients (including Prince George, later Duke of Kent) who visited during the Harrogate Season. In his spare time, James corresponded with two of the then leading figures of international archaeology, Howard Carter and Sir Leonard Woolley.
The current premises, which Richard Ogden moved to in the early 1950s, have their own colourful history. In Victorian times part of the building was occupied by a milliner whose “Guinea Bonnets” from Paris were the height of fashion. Mary Cathcart Borer in The Years of Grandeur: The Story of Mayfair (1975): “Madame Parsons sold her guinea bonnets at Numbers 26, 27 and 28. There was also a ‘friendly bonnet shop’ where the accommodating milliner allowed the rooms above to be used as a brothel and this rendezvous became as fashionable, in its way, as the shops, so that men of affairs, who wished to avoid any breath of scandal, took care to avoid the precincts of the arcade at certain times of the day.” For more elegant reasons, the premises rose to fame again in the 1960s, when Richard Ogden converted the lower ground floor into the famous Ring Room. This showroom has recently been refurbished to accommodate a series of fine jewellery exhibitions alongside its more traditional role
