Before Marks & Spencer, there was…?

Take a walk down High Holborn in central London, heading towards the ancient City of London, and just before you arrive at Holborn circus take a look at the office building to your left.

It might seem an innocuous building. A branch of WH Smith on the ground floor, and Steria’s London-based team in the upper floors, but look closer because this office used to house one of the icons of British retailing, Gamages.

Gamages was originally a small Drapers’ shop, much like many of the other nineteenth-century department stores that became household names.

Arthur Walter Gamage was the son of a Herefordshire farmer who was apprenticed to a London draper in St Paul’s churchyard. In 1878, at the age of 21 and having saved £40 (equivalent to £2,500 today) he decided to set up his own shop, in partnership with Frank Spain.

Between them they raised the £88 necessary to lease and fit a small watch repair shop in Holborn. The owner assured them that a hosiery shop would do well in the area. The frontage was no more than five feet and above it Gamage hung his motto “Tall Oaks from Little Acorns Grow.”

In 1881, Gamage bought out his partner and started expanding. By the end of the decade he had bought most of the surrounding property so his store filled the entire block, but because of the piecemeal expansion it was like negotiating a rabbit warren.

The store on Holborn eventually closed in 1972 and the site was redeveloped into what you now see as the Steria office, but it’s exciting for the Steria team to be connected so closely to a piece of retail history – especially when they spend such a lot of time demonstrating their expertise in the modern-day retail business working with clients.

Perhaps if Gamages was still around somewhere else in London, they might have worked with Steria today?