There was a time when leaving the house without a hat counted as a serious breach of etiquette rather than a matter of personal style. To find out what survives of that world we visited Lock & Co on St James's Street, the oldest hat shop in London and, by most accounts, the oldest in the world, and asked shop manager Maxwell Newman what three and a half centuries of hat making actually looks like from behind the counter.

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350 years in the making

Why Lock & Co Is the Oldest Hat Shop in the World

Lock & Co has traded from St James's Street since 1765, and the business itself dates back further still, to 1676, when it began life under a different name at the hands of a milliner called Robert Davis. That makes 2026 the shop's 350th year, a milestone that places it among London's oldest surviving shops and among the oldest family run businesses anywhere in the world. The Lock family, descendants of the James Lock who inherited the business from his father in law in the eighteenth century, still own and run it today, a continuity that is rare even among brands that trade heavily on the word heritage.

To understand why the location matters, it helps to remember what St James's was built to do. The street was laid out to serve St James's Palace, and it earned the distinction of being one of the first pedestrianised streets in London, complete with an early pavement so that the fashionable could walk to court without ruining their shoes in the mud. This was the newer end of town. The financial district we now think of as old London was already established. St James's, and the Mayfair that grew up around it, were still closer to farmland and herb gardens than to the city we know today. Lock & Co has an old map that shows the ground beneath the current shop as exactly that: a herb garden, long before anyone thought to sell a hat from the spot.

St James's Palace, seen from the street Lock & Co has traded from since 1765.

The building itself has lived several lives before settling into its current one. It has been a coffee house, an inn known as The Feathers, and at one point a clockmaker's, complete with a clock the shop still owns. What is now the shop floor was, within living memory of current staff, a rather less glamorous space with a tired carpet and an office at the back. The wooden floor and the sense of a working shop rather than a themed one are relatively recent additions, and deliberately so. Lock & Co has resisted the fate of many heritage brands, which is to be redesigned into an idea of what a heritage brand should look like. What you find instead is closer to what a pre war visitor would have recognised: a shop built to sell hats, not to sell an aesthetic.

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A rule, not a choice

Why Hat Wearing Was Once a Matter of Social Etiquette

It is easy to forget, in an age when most men own precisely one hat and reach for it only in bad weather, that hat wearing used to carry the same weight as wearing shoes or trousers. Long before Lock & Co existed, it was a matter of law that men cover their heads in church on a Sunday, and the habit hardened into something closer to social instinct than legal requirement. You did not leave home bare headed any more than you would leave home barefoot. The hat you chose said a great deal about who you were, which trade you followed, and which class you belonged to, in a way that few single garments manage today.

That level of social coding has faded, but the underlying logic of a hat has not. A hat still keeps the sun from your eyes, the wind and rain from your face, and in the right circumstances it still does the quiet work of telling a room something about you before you have said a word. What has changed is that wearing a hat is now an active decision rather than a passive obligation, and that shift arguably makes the decision more interesting than it used to be. Nobody chooses a bowler hat by accident in 2026, which is precisely why the choice carries weight. The etiquette that once dictated the decision for you has gone, but the character it once signalled has, if anything, become more visible for being voluntary.

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Built to last a lifetime

Why a Good Hat Should Be Repaired, Not Replaced

The single idea that separates a proper hatter from a shop that merely sells hats is what happens after the sale. At Lock & Co almost every part of a felt hat can be brought back to life. The hat can be re blocked to restore its shape, cleaned, and re trimmed with new ribbon, binding, or lining as the old wears out. The one part that cannot be replaced is the felt itself, which is really just an argument for buying the best felt you can afford in the first place, since everything built around it is renewable.

This changes the relationship you have with the object. A hat bought with the expectation of a lifetime of care behaves differently in your wardrobe than one bought to be discarded after a season. It is closer to the logic of a good pair of shoes, another item that looks slightly awkward fresh out of the box and only becomes itself once it has been worn in. Felt hats develop character the same way leather does, through use rather than despite it. Straw hats taken on safari, panamas that have crossed a few too many airport lounges, trilbies that have been rained on more times than their owner can count: these become, in the words of the people who sell them, something closer to old friends than accessories.

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Millimetres matter

How a Hatter Fits a Hat to Your Face

Anything worn this close to the face turns out to be a far more personal decision than most people expect when they walk in. A hat that looks wrong on the shelf can look entirely right once a hatter has made a single, small adjustment: a pinch to the crown, a fractional lift to the brim. Customers who arrive convinced a style does not suit them frequently leave wearing the best hat they have ever owned, changed by an alteration too small to describe in words.

The scale of these adjustments is remarkably small. Brim trims are measured in millimetres rather than centimetres, and even when a customer asks for a specific amount to come off, an experienced hatter will rarely take it all in one pass. The trim happens incrementally instead, a sliver at a time, until the fit is right rather than simply requested. It is the same principle a good optician applies, where a change too small to name still registers instantly to the eye. The brain notices what it cannot always explain, and a hat sits close enough to the face that every one of those small decisions shows.

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An unlikely export

Why the Bowler Hat Still Sells, and Where It Actually Came From

Few hats carry as much folklore as the bowler, and Lock & Co has a genuine claim to its invention. The story goes back to 1849, when Edward Coke, whose family owned the Holkham estate in Norfolk, asked for a close fitting, hard wearing hat that would protect his gamekeepers from low branches and would not blow off on horseback the way a top hat did. What Lock & Co produced became the bowler, known in America as the derby, and it went on to become one of the best selling styles the shop has ever made.

Gamekeepers at Holkham Hall, photographed in the bowler hat style first commissioned by Edward Coke in 1849.

Most of Lock & Co's bowler hats today are shipped to America, which surprises people who assume the style belongs firmly to the City gent or the English gamekeeper. In fact the bowler had an extraordinary run in the American West during the nineteenth century, worn by cowboys, lawmen, and outlaws in numbers that would surprise anyone whose picture of a cowboy hat is a wide brimmed Stetson. The wide brimmed style we now think of as the definitive cowboy hat existed alongside it, but for a significant stretch of the century the bowler was every bit as common on the frontier. Customers still come into the shop today carrying a photograph of a great grandfather in a bowler hat, wanting to continue a tradition they can trace in their own family album, long before they ever picture a City gent carrying an umbrella.

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From cap to topper

How to Choose a Hat Style That Suits You

Most people arrive at Lock & Co with one of two intentions: a hat for a specific occasion, or a hat simply for themselves. Both are well served. Flat caps and tweed styles cover the country end of the wardrobe, trilbies tend to be the easiest entry point into town hats because of their softer shape and shorter brim, and fedoras are usually where customers land once they have grown confident with a trilby and want something with a little more presence. Top hats remain essential for Royal Ascot and similarly formal fixtures, and bowler hats continue to sell steadily, bought as often for the sake of a bucket list as for daily wear.

There is no single correct answer here, which is rather the point. Personal taste plays as large a part as occasion, and the shop's own staff prove it daily. Maxwell Newman's signature style is a beret, worn regardless of what else is on the shelf, chosen simply because it became, over time, the hat that suited him best, tradition and ceremony aside. That is arguably a more useful lesson than any style guide could offer: the right hat is the one that, once you have tried enough of the alternatives, you find yourself reluctant to take off. Colour follows a similar logic to fabric elsewhere in a wardrobe. A charcoal or navy felt will sit quietly alongside almost any tailoring, while a lighter fawn or stone shade reads as a more considered, more deliberate choice, better suited to the man who already knows the rest of his outfit will carry the colour instead.

Maxwell Newman in his signature beret, styled two ways. Photograph: @maxwell_newman76

Material matters just as much as shape once the seasons change. Felt is a cold weather cloth, at its best from autumn through to early spring, and it is no accident that most of the trilbies and fedoras on the shelves at Lock & Co are felt. Come summer, straw takes over: panamas, boaters and lighter woven styles that breathe in a way felt never will, and that carry their own etiquette around occasion in the same way a felt hat does in winter. Neither material substitutes for the other, and a wardrobe that holds only felt hats is missing half the year entirely.

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In good company

Notable Customers Who Have Worn a Lock & Co Hat

A shop does not survive 350 years without dressing a fair number of notable heads. Lock & Co has been worn by Charlie Chaplin, holds a Royal Warrant as hatter to King Charles III, and has a long standing relationship with the James Bond films, having supplied hats to the franchise across several decades including the Sean Connery era. Past customers stretch back further still, taking in figures such as Admiral Lord Nelson and Oscar Wilde, a spread of patronage that runs from the Royal Navy to the theatre without ever settling into a single type. None of this is presented with any great fanfare inside the shop itself. The confidence comes from simply knowing the subject, rather than needing to announce it.

That comfort in its own heritage shows up in the way the shop is run day to day. There is a deliberate effort to avoid the guarded, formal atmosphere that some St James's addresses cultivate. Trying on a hat is treated as something to enjoy rather than something to be nervous about, and for many customers a Lock & Co hat is a once in a lifetime purchase, which is reason enough to make the experience a pleasant one rather than a solemn one.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Your Questions Answered

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