Visiting London at this time of year can be an immensely stressful experience. It’s likely to be warm, and it’s absolutely certain to be totally full of people. For this visit I wanted to keep is simple and I had almost nothing planned apart from a very short list of places I wanted to stop by. One of these was the Army Gym, the Nigel Cabourn shop in Covent Garden. Given that it’s the only of it’s kind outside of Japan, it’s something of an occasion to step over the doorstep.
It’s located at 28 Henrietta Street, just around the corner from the main Covent Garden structure. A fairly quiet street, sparsely populated with shops, such as The Real McCoys have their shop just over the road. There is nothing loud about the shop front and unless you were aware it is there you may well pass it by.
I’ll give them an immediate credit though for greeting me the moment I crossed the doorstep. And that pretty much set the tone for the visit. Bryan and Harry proved to be talkative and knowledgeable and even though we must have outstayed our welcome, several times, we felt very welcome. Our visit was during the final week of the Summer sale, with 50% off most items in the shop. Making space for the imminent arrival of the AW15 pieces meant there might not have been quite as much stock as usual.
The shop has space over two floors, with the current collection on the ground floor and previous season in the basement. There wasn’t much in the basement when I visited, so not much time was spent there. I did give the racks upstairs a thorough going through though! It’s always hard to get a good impression of clothes when only viewing photos, and for some reason or other the Cabourn clothes are often not presented well on photos. The most interesting pieces I found, and this actually came as something of a surprise, were the corduroy items, the Atkinson jacket and farm vest and trousers. More to come on those.
I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.
Love that place. Though it does always make me feel hot just looking through the window.
Buckets & Spades