W Sitch and Co. Ltd

Its easy to forget, passing by boutiques, mobile phone stores and and the UK's legion of security cameras, that Britain is a nation so steeped in history that it pre-dates many other nations, even considering that it felt the need to create many of them to better organise the economic exploitation of its many territories.

But it's not only the grand churches and halls of London that attest to more than a thousand years of permanence.  And it was to find a symbol of the ongoing lives of the common man, that we found our way to 48 Berwick Street in Soho.

An obscure description from a bartender the night before was all that had led us here, and waiting upon the threshold looking doubtfully at dusty windows and a decidedly unassuming sign on an even less noteworthy matte white door, neither of us were exactly filled with enthusiasm.  The proprietor answered his door, showing us in, confronting us with our lack of faith in Shoreditch bartenders.

W Sitch and Co. Ltd. was founded in 1776.  Thats 237 years ago.  Thats more than two centuries. Working with the assumption that the iron worker/visionary who started it all was, I don't know, middle aged? Then the business is definitively older than white settlement in Australia.  Ergo, virtually everything I have ever known is pre-dated by this family business.  For reference, here are some things that could be associated roughly with the founding of Sitch and Co.

The Signing of the Declaration of Independence, the founding of the Illuminati, the invention of the steam engine.  Mozart still had around fifteen years of his life left and was pumping out the hits*.  The French Revolution, wouldn't really be a thing for another two decades.   Two Hundred and Thirty Seven years still in business.  And looking around the place, I'd say they've sold maybe three or four things in all that time?

The current family member in charge, the Sitch of the moment (directly related to the founding patriarch, Ronald Sitch, by a factor of generations that would require so many repetitions of the word 'great' that it would in itself be comic) gave Michael and I free reign of the store and workshop, every inch of it crammed with fittings and fixtures.  You definitely get the impression that Great Uncle Archibald Sitch forgot to do his weekly tidy up in 1907 and then things just got away from him.

Nevertheless, the sheer diversity and pride in creation is unmistakable.  There are so many things, wonderful, crazy, beautiful things, crammed together so tightly through the buldings four floors that the photos cant really do it justice.  There are so many metal shapes piled up around the place that the floorboards bend in downwards in the centre of each room, under the weight of tables from above even as they are pulled down by wrought iron chains from beneath.

The whole place looks like its trapped in a time-lock.  And yet, it has found its place in the London of today, continually designing and creating fittings to match the world charging forward just outside its doors.  And then, at other times its age allows it a commercial edge.  After all, if Edinburgh Castle or 10 Downing Street need authentic replacements, who else would they call.  The original moulds are probably around somewhere, if not spares from their original casting.   Have you seen Titanic? Where do you think those Art Deco recreation wall brackets came from?  

By the lights of Sitch and Co., whether they be flame or filament**, the world has seen Colonialism, Imperialism, Facism, Communism Globalisation and Modernism form and fade and return again.  Michael swears that he saw a mouse, between an old clock and a pile of iron nails in the attic.  We tried to find it for a photo, but it decided to keep to the shadows.

 *  And by hits, I mean operas.

** Yes, I forgot to mention, this place pre-dates electricity.