Fortnum & Mason: 300 Years of Candle Stubs and Class
Few of Britain's great institutions can trace their origins to quite so charmingly opportunistic a beginning as Fortnum & Mason. Founded in 1707, the very same year the Act of Union created the Kingdom of Great Britain, the store's story begins not with grand ambition, but with a footman quietly turning royal waste into a tidy little side income.
A Footman's Side Hustle
William Fortnum worked as a footman in the royal household of Queen Anne, whose strict insistence on fresh candles every single evening left enormous quantities of barely used wax discarded each night. Ever enterprising, Fortnum began quietly collecting the half-burnt candle stubs and reselling them to ladies of the royal court for a tidy profit. Encouraged by the success of this modest sideline, Fortnum persuaded his landlord, a shopkeeper named Hugh Mason who ran a small store in St James's Market, to go into business with him properly. The partnership they formed that year became Fortnum & Mason, a grocery shop that used Fortnum's royal connections to attract exactly the sort of well-heeled clientele any new business could hope for.
Feeding the Empire's Officers
Subsequent generations of both founding families built steadily on that early royal connection. In 1761, William Fortnum's grandson Charles entered the service of Queen Charlotte, once again bringing valuable court patronage to the growing business, and the store relocated to its now-famous Piccadilly address in 1756, where it remains to this day. Fortnum's carved out a particular niche supplying ready-to-eat luxury food, including elaborate dishes of game and poultry preserved in aspic jelly, perfectly suited to wealthy Londoners without the time or inclination to cook elaborately themselves. The Napoleonic Wars proved surprisingly good for business too, as British officers serving abroad ordered packaged provisions from Fortnum's to sustain them on campaign — arguably one of the earliest examples of a British company supplying rations to soldiers fighting overseas. The tradition of luxury care packages continued into the Crimean War, when Queen Victoria personally ordered shipments of Fortnum's concentrated beef tea sent out to wounded soldiers, following Florence Nightingale's harrowing reports on hospital conditions there.
A History of Small, Tasty Inventions
Fortnum's has a genuine claim to several small but enduring culinary firsts. The store credits itself with inventing the Scotch egg in 1738, created as a convenient, portable snack for wealthy travellers heading out of London along Piccadilly, then the main road leading west out of the city. In 1886, after buying up an entire shipment of a new American product, Fortnum's became the first shop in Britain to sell tins of Heinz baked beans — a small but telling example of a very traditional institution being quicker than most to spot a genuinely useful innovation.
A Change of Family
Unlike some of Britain's other great family firms, Fortnum & Mason didn't remain in the hands of its founding families right through to the present day. In April 1951, following a boardroom takeover, the store was acquired by the Canadian businessman W. Garfield Weston, who became its chairman. Since Weston's death in 1978, the store has remained under the control of his family's holding company, and today is run by his granddaughters, Jana Khayat and Kate Hobhouse. It's a slightly different lineage than the original Fortnum and Mason families themselves, but the store has remained privately, closely held and run with real personal investment throughout, its identity as a quintessentially British institution never once seriously in doubt.
The Clock That Bows to Its Founders
One of the store's most charming features dates from this later Weston era. In 1964, Garfield Weston commissioned an enormous four-ton mechanical clock to be installed above the Piccadilly entrance, as a tribute to the store's original founders. Every hour, four-foot-high models of William Fortnum and Hugh Mason emerge and bow politely to one another, accompanied by chimes and period-style eighteenth-century music — a small, theatrical piece of London street furniture that has delighted passers-by for sixty years.
Still Serving the Crown
Fortnum's first Royal Warrant was granted by Queen Victoria in 1898, recognising its long service as supplier of "oils" to the Royal Household, and the store has continued to hold royal warrants ever since, receiving its most recent from King Charles III and Queen Camilla in 2024. It's a fitting continuation for a business whose entire origin story began, more than three centuries ago, with one enterprising footman's eye for turning a royal household's leftover candle wax into something rather more lasting.
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