| |
Button Queen owner Martyn Frith is set to shut up shop for new premises |
Whole new era for Button Queen shop
Store set for new premises after almost 50 years of serving customers and rescuing royals
A SHOP that has been turning out brass-buttoned staff at Buckingham Palace for almost 50 years, once even helping a princess out of a fix, is moving from its Marylebone home.
The Button Queen has been a life-saver to uninspired fashion designers, fastidious collectors and more than one over-wrought gent looking to mend his smoking jacket on-the-hoof to Boodles.
In a “glass slipper moment”, even the late Princess Margaret had to call on Martyn Frith’s services when she lost the button to her favourite green jacket.
In March Mr Frith, 61, and his bounty of buttons are leaving the cramped premises in Marylebone Lane they have called home since 1976.
But it’s not the familiar rent stitch-up, because the Button Queen is moving to a bigger and better shop just up the road.
Mr Frith said: “In many ways it is a success story. We will be sad to leave but we’re only going around the corner.
“At the moment the shop does have a kind of cultivated old-world feel to it – it’s a bit like a timewarp, but it’s high time we came into the 21st century.”
Organised chaos is the best way of describing the shop which proudly proclaims itself “the campest name in London”.
Shoeboxes are piled high to the ceiling, and shiny buttons of all shapes and sizes from plastic lips to gold engraved with Arthurian legends are strewn across the counter – a taxonomist’s dream somewhere between Steptoe and Son and a provincial museum.
Demands for “a flat black one”, the flash of a cardigan or a faded sepia photo of a brass-buckled brigadier can send Mr Frith into raptures, scurrying around, pulling out stepladders and chattering away excitedly.
It is the thrill of the hunt that keeps him in the job, he says.
“The thing about this job is you never know what you’re going to get when someone steps through the door,” said Mr Frith. “It’s the challenge I love.
“You have to get into the mind of the customer, because when they come to describe the button they want, they often don’t have the words.
“We get all the usual requests – lost buttons on dinner jackets, old ladies and collectors, but we also get some pretty unusual things.”
Among the more bizarre was the time Mr Frith was called to an archaeological dig in Winchester to solve the mystery of a button with four never-seen-before holes, and when a mystery lady bequeathed her family button box to the shop, which was later found to contain a priceless invitation to the coronation of William IV in 1832. The lady turned out to be a relative of Queen Mary.
Mr Frith took over the business from his mother, the original Button Queen, who used to sell jewellery and buttons at Portobello and Bermondsey markets.
She moved into a shop off Carnaby Street in the late 1950s and eventually moved out when the business took off.
Following a brief spell in St Christopher’s Place, the Button Queen has been in Marylebone Lane ever since.
The store will be retain its name when it opens up at the other end of Marylebone Lane in March.
Mr Frith says the new shop will have more displays so he doesn’t have to spend so much time looking for things. |
 |
|
| |
| |
