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Harrods is an upmarket department store located on Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London. The Harrods brand also applies to other enterprises undertaken by the Harrods group of companies including Harrods Bank, Harrods Estates, Harrods Aviation and Air Harrods, and to Harrods Buenos Aires, sold by Harrods in 1922 and closed , with plans announced to reopen in 2013.〔(La Nación newspaper, Buenos Aires, Harrods, the return of an icon of Bienos Aires, April 2010 ) 〕 The store occupies a site and has 330 departments covering one million square feet () of retail space, making it the biggest department store in Europe. The Harrods motto is ''Omnia Omnibus Ubique'', which is Latin for 'All Things for All People, Everywhere'. Several of its departments, including the seasonal Christmas department and the Food Halls, are well known. == History == Harrods founder Charles Henry Harrod first established his business in 1824, aged 25. The business was located south of the River Thames in Southwark. The premises were located at 228 Borough High Street. He ran this business, variously listed as a draper, mercer and a haberdasher, certainly until 1831.〔Rate Books April 1824 to April 1831 held at Local History Library, Borough High Street, Southwark, London.〕〔1830 Critchett’s Directory, London.〕〔1832 Robson’s Directory〕 During 1825 the business was listed as 'Harrod and Wicking, Linen Drapers, Retail',〔Pigot’s Directory of 1826-27〕 but this partnership was dissolved at the end of that year. His first grocery business appears to be as ‘Harrod & Co.Grocers’ at 163 Upper Whitecross Street, Clerkenwell, E.C.1., in 1832.〔1832 Robson's Directory〕 In 1834 in London's East End, he established a wholesale grocery in Stepney, at 4, Cable Street, with a special interest in tea. In 1849, to escape the vice of the inner city and to capitalise on trade to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in nearby Hyde Park, Harrod took over a small shop in the district of Brompton, on the site of the current store. Beginning in a single room employing two assistants and a messenger boy, Harrod's son Charles Digby Harrod built the business into a thriving retail operation selling medicines, perfumes, stationery, fruits and vegetables. Harrods rapidly expanded, acquired the adjoining buildings, and employed one hundred people by 1880. However, the store's booming fortunes were reversed in early December 1883, when it burnt to the ground. Remarkably, in view of this calamity, Charles Harrod fulfilled all of his commitments to his customers to make Christmas deliveries that year—and made a record profit in the process. In short order, a new building was built on the same site, and soon Harrods extended credit for the first time to its best customers, among them Oscar Wilde, Lillie Langtry, Ellen Terry, Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Sigmund Freud, A. A. Milne, and many members of the British Royal Family. On Wednesday, 16 November 1898, Harrods debuted England's first "moving staircase" (escalator) in their Brompton Road stores; the device was actually a woven leather conveyor belt-like unit with a mahogany and "silver plate-glass" balustrade.〔"The First Moving Staircase in England." ''The Drapers' Record'', 19 November 1898: 465.〕 Nervous customers were offered brandy at the top to revive them after their 'ordeal'. The department store was purchased by the Fayed brothers in 1985.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Harrods」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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