Hatton Garden

Hatton Garden is a street and area in the district of Holborn in London Borough of Camden, England. It is most famous for being London’s jewellery quarter and centre of the UK diamond trade, but the area is also now home to a diverse range of media and creative businesses.

The name ‘Hatton Garden’ is derived from the garden of the Bishop of Ely, which was given to Sir Christopher Hatton by Elizabeth I in 1581, during a vacancy of the see.

The area around Hatton Garden has been the centre of London's jewellery trade since medieval times. The old City of London had certain streets, or quarters, dedicated to types of business, and the area around Hatton Garden became a centre for jewellers and jewellery.

Nearly 300 of the businesses in Hatton Garden are in the jewellery industry and over 55 shops represent the largest cluster of jewellery retailers in the UK. The largest of these companies is De Beers, the international family of companies that dominate the international diamond trade. De Beers has its headquarters in a complex of offices and warehouses just behind the main Hatton Garden shopping street.

Hatton Garden also has a large number of media, publishing and creative businesses, including Grey (advertising agency), Terrapinn (conference organiser), Publishing Events (contract publisher), Thomson Reuters (business information publisher), The Domarn Group (design agency), Knightstone Publishing (book publishing) and The Energy Exchange (conference organiser).

The nearby streets including Hatton Place and Saffron Hill have become more residential in recent years with the building of several blocks of 'luxury' apartments, including the architecturally distinctive Ziggurat Building.

Ely Place, off Hatton Garden, is home to St Etheldreda's Church – one of the oldest Roman Catholic church in England and one of only two remaining buildings in London dating from the reign of Edward 1.

Michael Flanders and Donald Swann (humorists of the 1960s and 1970s), celebrated Hatton Garden's connection with the jewellery trade in their song of a sewage worker, "Down Below":

Hatton Garden is the spot, down below

Where we likes to go a lot, down below,

Since a bloke from Leather Lane,

Dropped a diamond down the drain,

We'll be going there again, down below."

A building with statues of charity school children is former chapel and parish school, now known as Wren House.

Hatton Garden features in the 1967 children's novel Smith by Leon Garfield, where the main character tries to elude two pursuers through the crumbling streets of 18th century Holborn.

In 1962, Lawrence Graff of Wittelsbach-Graff Diamond fame, opened the first retail jewellery store here.