1950s Harrods of London Cardboard Box

This cardboard box was used by Harrods in the 1950s. It is printed with the store's logo of the period in deep burgundy and still carries the address label with which it was sent out, which makes it the record of an actual delivery rather than an unused piece of packaging. Harrods began when Charles Henry Harrod moved his grocery business from the East End to Brompton Road in Knightsbridge in 1849, hoping to benefit from the Great Exhibition held nearby in Hyde Park in 1851. Under his son, Charles Digby Harrod, the shop grew rapidly, and in 1898 it installed London's first moving staircase. By the 1950s Harrods was among the best-known department stores in the world.

In the 1950s the department store was still the centre of fashionable shopping in London. Harrods offered fashion alongside food, furniture and household goods, and its reputation rested on range and service as much as on any single department. The landscape was beginning to change. Independent boutiques such as Mary Quant's Bazaar started to appear across the city in the 1950s and 1960s, appealing to a younger customer, and Harrods would respond with its own Way In boutique in 1967. A Harrods box of the 1950s comes from the years just before that shift, when buying from the great store and having goods sent home remained the established model of luxury shopping.

The 1950s in Britain were a decade of recovery. Rationing, introduced during the war, came to a final end in 1954, and with it returned a wider range of goods and the pleasure of choosing among them. Delivery from a department store was part of domestic life: purchases were chosen in person or ordered, then sent on, arriving at the door in branded boxes. The box itself announced where something came from, and a Harrods box carried a particular message about quality and status. Kept and reused for storage, such boxes often outlived the goods they had contained.

The most striking feature of the box is its colour. Today Harrods is inseparable from green and gold, but that identity was formalised later: from 1967 the designers Minale Tattersfield developed a house style for the store, standardising a green and gold palette that had previously existed in a range of inconsistent shades, and applying it to packaging, vehicles and carrier bags. A deep burgundy logo belongs to the store's visual history before that standardisation. The address label adds a second layer of evidence, linking the box to a specific delivery. Together they turn an ordinary object into a document of how the store presented itself and how its goods travelled.

Packaging is designed to be thrown away, and most of it is. Branded boxes that survive from the 1950s therefore record a part of retail history that is otherwise largely lost: the printed identity of a store before modern corporate design, and the practical reality of delivery. For collectors of Harrods memorabilia and of mid-century British design, and for interiors in which a period object can serve as storage or display, the box offers both. In good condition with light signs of use, it keeps its print and its original label, the two features that give it its character.