Every coat that leaves this room began as a paper pattern drafted to a single person and kept in a drawer for the rest of their life. Nothing here is graded from a size chart. Nothing is cut twice the same way.
Give us five figures and the block draws itself — the same proportional draft Sidney Rowe wrote into the house book in 1926, scye depth from the chest, waist suppression shared between side seam, back seam and forepart dart. Change a style and the coat beside it is rebuilt; change the cloth and the whole room takes its colour.
Horsehair canvas padded by hand through chest and lapel over roughly forty hours. It moulds to you and stays moulded.
| Drafted point | House formula | Value |
|---|
No estimate leaves this house with a range on it. Cloth is charged at the merchant's metre price with nothing added; labour is charged by the garment and the construction. The diary below books backwards from the day the coat is finished.
Sixteen weeks from measure to collection.
Balance falls due at the finish fitting. Patterns remain the property of the house and are kept for you; alterations for the first two years are without charge.
Twenty-two measurements taken, then the things a tape cannot record: how you stand, which shoulder drops, whether you drive or ride, what you carry in which pocket. Cloth is chosen from the bunches in daylight by the window, never under lamps.
Isobel drafts your block in chalk on brown paper, then in cloth. The pattern is your property in all but name; it goes into the drawers with your card and every alteration made to it since. Nothing is cut on a screen.
The coat arrives held together with white basting thread and no sleeves. It will look wrong, and it is meant to. We rip, chalk, pin and rip again: balance, the run of the collar, where the coat wants to sit on your neck.
Sleeves set, canvas in, pockets cut. This is where the shoulder is settled for good — a quarter of an inch off the back of the scye, the sleeve pitch turned forward to the way your arm actually hangs at rest.
Linings in, buttonholes worked, hems marked. Trousers are fitted at the fork and the bottoms marked over the shoes you will actually wear with them. Last chance for a change of mind about the vent.
Pressed, brushed, boxed in the house's claret tissue. You put it on, walk to the mirror at the end of the room, and if anything at all is not right it goes back upstairs that afternoon. Most do not.
We hold no house cloth and take no commission from mills. These are the six we return to; between them they cover a working wardrobe from a summer wedding in Suffolk to a February morning on a Scottish platform.
The house workhorse. A dense 13oz twill that takes a press, holds a crease through a wet Tuesday and looks better at ten years than at one.
Herringbone at 11oz, spun from Australian lambswool with a faint grey overcheck. The chevron reads across a room without ever announcing itself.
Midnight birdseye, a white weft dot on navy warp. The evening cloth: reads solid at three paces, alive at one, and never shines under a chandelier.
Fourteen ounces of tobacco herringbone with a burr in the yarn. Cut it as an odd jacket or a country suit; it wants to be worn in the rain and forgiven.
A claret-shot birdseye at 9oz, woven on hand looms four metres at a time. We take the whole piece when it comes; when it is gone it is gone.
An open 8oz high-twist twill that breathes and refuses to crease. The July cloth, and the one cut most often for weddings between May and September.
Alfred Aldgate came back from Flanders with a trade, forty-one pounds and a lease on a passage nobody wanted. Sidney Rowe, who had cut for a naval outfitter in Portsmouth, joined him eighteen months later and never left. The shop has moved once, by eleven feet, when the building next door was rebuilt in 1953.
Two rooms above a locksmith, one gas ring, and a cutting table Alfred built from the floorboards of a bombed church hall in Bermondsey. The table is still in use upstairs.
Sidney Rowe writes down the drafting proportions the shop still uses — scye depth from the chest, suppression shared three ways. The original is in the safe; a photocopy lives on the wall by the shears.
Rationing ends for cloth in 1949, but not before the house has spent four years turning demobilisation suits and remaking coats out of two older ones. Ninety of those patterns survive.
The first woman to cut on or off the Row at that time, and the author of the house's two-piece sleeve. She trained every cutter who has worked here since.
Eleven thousand cards indexed over two winters by Margaret's apprentice, so that a grandson can walk in and be cut from his grandfather's block within the hour.
Isobel Rowe heads the board. Tomasz Wieczorek makes coats, Dilan Mehmet trousers, and Grace Amankwah — three years out of her apprenticeship — strikes and pads every canvas in the building.
I stand up in court for six hours at a stretch. Isobel watched me do it once, from the public gallery, and then cut the coat a quarter of an inch longer in the back than the tape said. That is the whole difference.
I asked for pockets that would take a notebook and a hand lens without hanging like saddlebags. Nobody had ever asked them that. They spent the baste fitting arguing about it and got it right.
A conductor's coat has one job: to let both arms go straight up and come down again without the whole thing riding to my ears. Three houses failed at it. Tomasz set the sleeves twice and it has never moved since.
My grandmother's card is in that drawer, from 1961. They pulled it out, put it next to mine, and we all stood there for a minute. Then Grace made me a coat out of a Donegal claret that would have made her laugh.
Bespoke, in the sense the word had before it was borrowed by advertising: a pattern drafted from nothing to your figure, cut by hand on our own table, and fitted at least four times on your body. We do not offer made-to-measure. If a block already exists for you in the drawers upstairs, we start from that and recut it.
Roughly eighty-four hours of hand work per coat, spread across a workroom of nine people who each have twenty commissions in front of them. Padding a chest and lapel alone is two full days. Forwarding the diary by four weeks costs fourteen per cent on the labour because somebody else's coat has to wait.
Everything we cut carries inlays: an inch and a half in the side seams, an inch in the centre back, three quarters at the trouser seat. That covers roughly two stone in either direction. Alterations are free for the first two years and charged at cost thereafter — usually £60 to £140.
Yes, and people often do — an inherited length, something found in a mill shop in the Borders. We will tell you honestly whether it is enough (3.6 metres for a two-piece at 150cm width) and whether it will tailor. We charge labour only, and we cannot replace it if it fails at the press.
Since 1943, when the first was cut for a Wren officer, and continuously since Margaret Rowe took the shears in 1971. Roughly a third of the board is women's work. The draft on this page adjusts to any figure you give it.
It stays here, in a card drawer, with your name and the date of every alteration written on the edge. You are welcome to see it, photograph it, or ask us to send a copy to another tailor. We will not sell it, digitise it for anyone else, or use it as the basis for another person's coat.
Ninety minutes, a cup of tea, the bunches by the window and no obligation whatsoever. Bring a jacket you like the fit of and one you do not; both are useful. We are a four-minute walk from Piccadilly Circus, second door on the left under the arch.
Or telephone 020 7946 0219, Tuesday to Saturday, nine until six. We answer it ourselves.