Hatton Garden

Updated on Feb 03, 2024

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Major cities London

Similar Farringdon station, Chancery Lane tube station, Ye Olde Mitre, London Underground, Bloomsbury Square

Hatton garden jewellery jewellers all at hattongarden com

Hatton Garden is a street and area in the Holborn district of the London Borough of Camden. It is noted as London's jewellery quarter and centre of the UK diamond trade, but is now home to a diverse range of media and creative businesses.

Map of Hatton Garden, London EC1N, UK

The name 'Hatton Garden' is derived from the garden of Ely Place, the London residence of the Bishop of Ely, which was given to Sir Christopher Hatton by Elizabeth I in 1581, during a vacancy of the see.

The area surrounding Hatton Garden has been the centre of London's jewellery trade since medieval times. The old City of London had streets, or quarters, dedicated to types of business, and the area around Hatton Garden became a centre for jewellers and jewellery. Nearly 300 businesses in Hatton Garden are in the jewellery industry and over 55 shops represent the largest cluster of jewellery retailers in the UK. The largest of these companies is De Beers, the international family of companies that dominate the international diamond trade. De Beers has its headquarters in a complex of offices and warehouses just behind the main Hatton Garden shopping street. The area also plays host to a large number of media, publishing and creative businesses, including Blinkbox and Grey Advertising.

Hatton Garden has an extensive underground infrastructure of vaults, tunnels, offices and workshops.

Hatton Garden was also the home to the invention of the machine gun. Sir Hiram Maxim had a small factory at 57 Hatton Garden and in 1881 invented and started to produce the Maxim Gun, capable of firing 666 rounds a minute.

The nearby streets including Hatton Place and Saffron Hill have become more residential in recent years with the building of several blocks of 'luxury' apartments, including Da Vinci House situated in the former "Punch magazine" printworks and the architecturally distinctive Ziggurat Building.

Ely Place, off Hatton Garden, is home to St Etheldreda's Church – one of the oldest Roman Catholic churches in England and one of only two remaining buildings in London dating from the reign of Edward I. A building with statues of charity school children is a former chapel and parish school, now known as Wren House.

In 1962, Lawrence Graff of Wittelsbach-Graff Diamond fame, opened the first retail jewellery store here.

Crime

In July 1993 thieves stole £7 million worth of gems belonging to the jewellers Graff Diamonds - it was London's biggest gem heist of modern times.

In April 2015, an underground safe deposit facility in Hatton Garden area was burgled in the Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary. The total stolen may have had a value of up to £200m, although court reports referred to a lesser figure of £14m. The theft was investigated by the Flying Squad, a branch of the Specialist, Organised & Economic Crime Command within London's Metropolitan Police Service, leading to the arrests and March 2016 convictions of seven perpretators.

Street names etymologies

Hatton Garden has no formally defined boundaries - those utilised here are: Clerkenwell Road to the north, Farringdon Road to the east, Holborn and Charterhouse Street to the south and Gray's Inn road to the west.

Baldwins Gardens – from Richard Baldwin (or Baldwyn), gardener to Queen Elizabeth I and treasurer of the Middle Temple, who owned property in the area in the 16th century

Beauchamp Street – from Beauchamp Court, the Warwickshire birthplace of Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, local property owner

Black Bull Yard - unknown' this yard has now largely been covered by shop developments and is not accessible to the public

Bleeding Heart Yard – thought to be from the sign of a former pub in this area called the Bleeding Heart

Brooke Street, Brooke’s Court and Brooke’s Market – after Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, who owned a house near here in the 17th century

Charterhouse Street – Anglicisation of Chartreuse, from Grande Chartreuse, head monastery of the Carthusians in France - a nearby abbey was founded by monks of this order in 1371

Clerkenwell Road – from a local well (‘the clerk’s well), which gave its name to the area to this district

Dorrington Street – corruption of ‘Doddington’, from Anne Doddington, wife of Robert Grenville who owned a house near here in the 17th century

Ely Court and Ely Place – after the Bishops of Ely, Cambridgeshire who owned much of this area prior to 1659

Farringdon Road – from Sir William or Nicholas de Farnedon/Faringdon, local sheriffs or aldermen in the 13th century

Greville Street – from Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, who owned a house near here in the 17th century

Gray’s Inn Road – from Lord Gray of Wilton, owner of a local inn or town house which was later leased to lawyers in the 16th century

Hatton Garden, Hatton Place and Hatton Wall – from Sir Christopher Hatton, who was ceded much of this area from the Bishops of Ely by Elizabeth I in 1659

Holborn – thought to be from ‘hollow bourne’ i.e. the river Fleet which formerly flowed in a valley near here

Kirby Street – from Christopher Hatton’s Kirby House in Northamptonshire

Leather Lane – thought to come not from ‘leather’ but from Leofrun, a personal name in Old English. Formerly known as Le Vrunelane (13th century), Loverone Lane (14th century) and Liver Lane

Leigh Place – from a certain ‘Leigh’, who bought land in the area from the Baldwin family in 1689

Lily Place – unknown

Onslow Street - unknown

Portpool Lane – thought to be a corruption of ‘Purta’s Pool’, the local area is recorded as the manor of Purtepol in the early 13th century

Saffron Hill and Saffron Street – these used to be the gardens of the Bishops of Ely, where they grew saffron

St Cross Street – originally Cross Street, as it crossed land belonging to the Hatton family. The ‘St’ was added in 1937 to avoid confusion with numerous streets of the same name

Verulam Street – from 16th – 17th century lawyer, scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon, later created Baron Verulam, who had chambers at Gray’s Inn opposite

Viaduct Buildings – after their position directly adjacent to Holborn Viaduct

Waterhouse Square – after Alfred Waterhouse, architect of Holborn Bars, also known as the Prudential Assurance Building which surrounds the square

Hatton Garden in fiction

Michael Flanders and Donald Swann (humorists of the 1960s and 1970s) celebrated Hatton Garden's connection with the jewellery trade in their song of a sewage worker, "Down Below":

Hatton Garden is the spot, down below Where we likes to go a lot, down below, Since a bloke from Leather Lane, Dropped a diamond down the drain, We'll be going there again, down below.

Hatton Garden features in the 1967 children's novel Smith by Leon Garfield, where the main character tries to elude two pursuers through the crumbling streets of 18th century Holborn.

The Avengers, Season 2, Episode 10, "Death on the Rocks," is set in the diamond business in Hatton Garden.

References

Hatton Garden Wikipedia

(Text) CC BY-SA