The builders were still applying the finishing touches yesterday morning but the spacious rooms in the Bloomsbury townhouse looked fully finished by the time visitors started rolling up in the evening for champagne and canapes.
The venerable fifth-generation dealership left the firm’s home for the previous 78 years in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square at the end of 2015. For the last 18 months, Maggs has been based in a shop in Shepherd Market while the renovation to the Bedford Square building took place.
Managing director Ed Maggs, whose great-great grandfather Uriah Maggs founded the firm in 1853, made a speech and cut the cake to mark the opening.
Guests at the opening event were able to peruse the two floors of the building that Maggs now occupies with Bloomsbury Publishing maintaining office space on the upper storeys.
Items on display at the event included a set of 18th century London engravings by Samuel Buck and Nathaniel Buck as well as some Augustus John drawings of TE Lawrence. A copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom annotated in the author’s hand also adorned a cabinet near the bar.
Speaking to ATG, Ed Maggs said the firm had decided to retain its smaller shop in Curzon Street which, he believes, is more accessible to new and younger buyers than the Grade I-listed Bedford Square space. Indeed, the latter building has a green plaque on the outside denoting it was the former location of Bedford College – an institution, rather appropriately, where George Eliot had studied.
