Hatton Garden

Hatton Garden is Britain's diamond quarter — for more than a century the centre of the UK jewellery trade, tucked between Holborn and Clerkenwell. At its historical peak, as much as 90% of the world's diamond supply was marketed through these few streets.

The trade grew here in the early 1800s, spreading from the older craft workshops of neighbouring Clerkenwell. Its rise to a world centre came with the southern-African diamond discoveries of the 1870s–80s: the London Diamond Syndicate — ten firms based around the Garden — controlled the distribution of rough stones and pulled the heart of the diamond trade from Amsterdam to London. Successive waves of immigrant craftspeople, many of them Jewish jewellers who had fled persecution in Eastern Europe and Russia, built a close-knit, multilingual community whose café-table dealing eventually became the London Diamond Bourse.

From the 1960s the bench work increasingly moved overseas and the district turned toward what it is best known for today: retail and, above all, bespoke commissioning. It remains the UK's largest single cluster of jewellery retailers — the place Britain goes to have an engagement ring made — with much of the real trade still running on introductions and reputation through the workshops and dealing rooms behind the shopfronts.