Past Times

Mishcon de Reya moved into its Red Lion Square offices in 2002. The Firm is rather proud of its building and its heritage and has done a great deal to maintain and restore the many interesting architectural features that have been discovered

Summit House is a Grade II listed building, built in 1925 for tailors Austin Reed by Westwood and Emberton who were part of the first group of architects to design art deco buildings in the UK.

P.J. Westwood came from a tailoring family himself, and Austin Reed had been a personal friend for a number of years. The huge oak front doors of the building were originally panelled with carvings of shirts, ties, gloves and other relevant motifs. Most of these interesting panels were removed many years ago but two still remain, depicting the year that the building was constructed and the letterbox.

Perhaps the most notable resident of a house situated on the same site as Summit House was the eighteenth century inventor John Harrison (whose residence is commemorated by a blue plaque on the east wall of the building).

Harrison invented the marine chronometer and is responsible for revolutionising navigation. Before his famous chronometer was produced it was almost impossible for ships to gauge their longitudinal (east or west) position. Famous explorers from James Cook to Neil Armstrong have used and praised Harrison’s contribution to exploration and cartography, with Cook describing it as “…our faithful guide through all the vicissitudes of climates”. There is an appropriate legal twist to the story in that, although the British Government offered a prize of £20,000 for anybody who came up with a device that could accurately measure longitude, it took more than 12 years of battling before Harrison’s invention was officially recognised (and even then only after the intervention of the King). If only Harrison had had the benefit of Mishcon’s litigation team! The full fascinating story was told in “Longitude” by Dava Sobel which became the publishing hit of 1996 and a BBC dramatised documentary.

But for those less familiar with marine history, it was the discovery of a Harrison handheld chronometer, which made millionaires of Del Boy and Rodney in ‘Only Fools and Horses’!