The London Silver Vaults: Chancery Lane’s dazzling open secret
- London On The Ground
- Aug 16
- 7 min read
A glittering 'Aladdin’s cave' hidden under an office building houses the world’s largest silverware market.
In the centre of London’s legal district, but two levels under the ground, The London Silver Vaults boasts steel-lined concrete walls almost 4ft (1.2m) thick and a massive steel door.
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks and tours, please click here.
I had known for some time that it was there, but only recently went inside for the first time. London On The Ground visits London Under The Ground.
After descending the stairs I was greeted by ordinary looking double doors into a lobby area.
From there, I encountered a much more impressive door. This was the real deal, the entrance to the silver retail mall, marked with the name 'John Tann'. Makers of safes, the John Tann Company was established in 1795 and built the 7 tonne door here.
The 30 independent shops in The London Silver Vaults are reached down both sides of two long corridors that would not look out of place in a prison. Each has its own cell-like door and contains a number of display cabinets with an eye-catching array of shining silverware.
Many of the shops have been in the same family for 50 years or more. They sell antique, modern and contemporary silver and silver-plated items from the 1600s to the present day. Products come from the UK, Europe, Asia and America and include cutlery and other tableware, ornaments, jewellery, watches and rare collectors’ items.
The large number of shops creates pricing tension and The London Silver Vaults is said to offer competitive prices compared with other silverware retail venues.
The story of The London Silver Vaults starts in 1885, when the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit Company opened (I think 1885 is most probable, although the London Silver Vaults website says 1882 and some other sources say 1876).
It was only the second non-bank private safe depositary in the country (the first was the National Safe Deposit Company, next to Mansion House at 1 Queen Victoria Street, which later became the City of London Magistrates Court).
Its chief promoter was Thomas Clarke, a spectacle maker, who was elected as one of the two Sheriffs of the City of London in 1885.
The Chancery Lane Safe Deposit Company provided wealthy businessmen, merchants, bankers and members of the aristocracy with safes and strong-rooms for the secure storage of their silverware and other personal and household valuables and documents, watched over by guards with truncheons and rifles.
Customers would use the facility when they were away from London and some families had their own private vault. The Company used John Tann safes, also used by the Bank of England. Today the lobby area has an old, prize-winning, John Tann safe on display.
A newspaper article of April 1885 praised the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit Company for its attendants who “are constantly on duty” to verify the identity of “renters of safes or depositors of valuables” in its “magnificent external hall” of marble and mosaic, before admitting them to the vaults.
It drooled over “the whole appearance being suggestive rather of an entrance to a palace than to a place of business, although entirely constructed of incombustible material”.
The article reserves its most wide-eyed admiration for the business logic behind the venture:
“When we consider the almost incalculable number of documents and other valuables which require apiece of absolutely safe deposit, the wonder is that no such place has before now been constructed towards the West of London, and especially in the immediate neighbourhood of the Law Courts.”
It also described the "massive granite archway, and the largest engraved brass plate to be seen in the World" in addition to the wrought iron gates and "ponderous iron grille" at its street entrance on Chancery Lane.
The Lady’s Pictorial of August 1886 wrote that a correspondent, looking forward to her annual summer holiday in Folkestone, no longer looked in the daily paper “with trembling” at the “list of burglarious attempts”, dreading “a detailed account of the breaking-in of my own familiar mansion”.
“All my worldly goods that are of any value are secure in the keeping of the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit Company”, she continued, “and when the ‘enterprising burglar goes a-burgling’, he will find my own house a very unprofitable hunting-ground.”
The Lady’s Pictorial noted that “peace of mind” cost only one guinea (one pound and one shilling) annually, while renting a safe for a month cost just five shillings.
This suggests that the vaults’ services were not exclusively for the very wealthy. According to the Bank of England inflation calculator, one guinea in 1886 is worth £118 today and five shillings is worth £28 today.
However, sometimes the vaults’ use defied economic logic. According to one story, a customer stored a farthing (a coin worth a quarter penny) for many years, eventually paying more than £100 in total to the vaults. Perhaps the coin had sentimental value?
Dealers in nearby Hatton Garden - for centuries London's principal area for trade in jewellery, gems and precious metals - also used the vaults to store their most valuable stock. They would deposit items overnight and take them back to their shops in the morning.
Only five years after opening, in 1890, the vaults had 6,000 safe boxes and more than 3,000 customers.
The Company underlined its own confidence in the security of its system in an advertisement in 1893. Headed “Burglars Wanted”, it sought an "enterprising Bill Sykes" to try his hand “on the invincible premises at Chancery Lane”.
The Company’s facilities sometimes saw unusual uses.
The advertisement below, from 1906, is for The Evans Vacuum Cap, a product for restoring men’s hair growth. The ad offers a 60 day money back guarantee, but requests “as an evidence of good faith, that the price of the Cap be deposited with the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit Company”, returnable on demand “at any time during the trial period”.
By the 1930s, the safe deposit company’s customer base had largely shifted away from wealthy individuals and mainly comprised London’s silver dealers. They now began to use entire vault rooms, rather than just a safety deposit box, to store their items. By the early 1940s, some dealers had started to sell directly from the vaults.
During World War II, in the Blitz, the building that stood above the Safe Deposit Company on Chancery Lane was totally destroyed in a German bombing raid. However, the vaults’ subterranean location and reinforced construction ensure that they were left intact.
This vindicated a claim made in the 1885 newspaper report that “everything that modern science and skill could devise has been done to form the safe deposit into an absolutely Fire and Burglar-proof Fortress”. Bomb-proof too.
Both during and after World War II, American servicemen - typically better paid than the average Brit - became valued customers for London's silver merchants. The vaults were popular with members of the US armed forces and their wives while stationed in the UK and other European countries.
The building on Chancery Lane, known as Chancery House, was rebuilt in 1953. By then, the strong-rooms 40 feet below had been fully transformed from safety deposit vaults crammed with piles of inventory into what they are today, a more agreeable underground silverware shopping mall open to the public.
According to its website, the glittering treasures of The London Silver Vaults have attracted many glittering stars of the world of entertainment.
Customers have included Mick Jagger, Princess Margaret, J K Rowling, Liberace, Anthony Hopkins, Diana Ross, Woody Allen and Gregory Peck. Royalty from around the world have also shopped here.
The unique appearance and ambience of The London Silver Vaults have been featured on TV and in films, including Downton Abbey and the James Bond series.
Nobody has ever managed to break into the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit Company, which is said to rival Fort Knox, the New York Federal Reserve and the Bank of England among the world’s safest vaults.
Indeed, an 1889 newspaper article reported the opinion of a reformed burglar that “it would be easier to break into the Bank of England than into such premises as, for instance, those of the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit Company.”
The article said that “thousands of Englishmen on seaside pleasure” were safeguarding their property with the Company’s “perfect system”, which made it “impossible for thieves or fire to bring about loss; while the cost of the protection is very trifling”.
Today anyone can just walk in off the street, go down the stairs (or take the lift) to The London Silver Vaults and take a look around this gleaming treasury. What’s more, few Londoners seem to know it’s here, so you may well have the place almost entirely to yourself.
The London Silver Vaults is open to the public 9am-5.20pm Monday to Friday (apart from Bank Holidays) and 9am to 12.50pm on Saturdays. The street entrance is on Southampton Buildings at the southern end of Chancery House.
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks and tours, please click here.
London On The Ground now has a Tripadvisor listing
If you have enjoyed one of my tours, please take a moment to write a brief review on Tripadvisor by clicking on this link. Thank you!
Fascinating! Now I know where I can get a silver lid for my jar of Marmite!