--- title: "Truefitt & Hill Has Been Shaving London Since the Week of Trafalgar" url: https://quietmenace.com/grooming/truefitt-and-hill-st-jamess-barbershop/ author: Quiet Menace Editors section: Grooming published: 2026-10-29 updated: 2026-10-29 topics: Grooming Essentials, Heritage Brands, Fragrance --- # Truefitt & Hill Has Been Shaving London Since the Week of Trafalgar > Guinness calls it the oldest barber shop business in the world. The address on St James's Street is younger than you'd think, and the hot towel shave is still the reason to go. On October 21, 1805, the day Nelson's fleet met the French and Spanish off Cape Trafalgar, a hairdresser named William Francis Truefitt opened for business at 2 Cross-Lane, Long Acre, in London. He styled himself hairdresser to the British Royal Court, and his first Royal Warrant, from King George III, was a wigmaker's warrant. Some later accounts flip his first names to Francis William. The trade and the year are not in dispute. Two centuries on, the business he started is still cutting hair, now at 71 St James's Street in the West End. [Guinness World Records](https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/74087-oldest-barber-shop-business) lists Truefitt and Hill as the oldest barber shop business in the world, with that 1805 opening on Cross-Lane as its starting point. Sources give different years for when Guinness first certified it, so treat the record as the headline and the date as a footnote. ## From wigs to Bond Street Truefitt did not stay on Cross-Lane for long. In 1811 the shop moved to 40 Old Bond Street, one of the smartest shopping streets in the city. The family firm added branches through the century, including one in the Burlington Arcade, and by the 1870s it was selling perfumes of its own alongside the haircuts. It also got into literature. In The Uncommercial Traveller, his collection of London sketches, [Charles Dickens](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/914) wanders through the Burlington Arcade in the empty weeks after the fashionable crowd has left town and notes that at Mr. Truefitt's, the excellent hairdresser's, the staff are passing the time by learning French. It is a throwaway line, and it tells you the name was familiar enough to drop without explanation. London histories of the shop credit William Makepeace Thackeray with mentioning it too. Every old barber has a symbol in the window. If you've wondered about the red and white stripes outside most shops, our [history of the barber pole](https://quietmenace.com/grooming/barber-pole-history/) explains where they came from. ## The Hill in Truefitt & Hill The second name arrived in 1935. That year Truefitt bought Edwin S. Hill and Co., a hairdressing business founded on Old Bond Street in 1911, and the combined firm settled at 23 Old Bond Street under the double name it still uses. The company itself dates its modern era to that merger. In 1941 the remaining regional Truefitt outlets were folded into the new company. For most of the twentieth century, then, Truefitt & Hill was a Bond Street institution. The move to St James's came in 1994, which is the detail that surprises people. The business is the oldest of its kind, but its time at number 71 runs to a little over thirty years. The name, the warrant history and the habits of the trade made the trip from Bond Street. ## Who sat in the chair The firm's own heritage page names a long list of customers, and some of them check out against other sources. Winston Churchill appears in the Guinness record entry and in London guides to the shop. Frank Sinatra and John Wayne turn up in several independent accounts as well. The company's longer list adds the Duke of Wellington, William Gladstone, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Fred Astaire and Cary Grant. Treat those as the house's claims rather than settled history. A barber's ledger is not a public archive. The royal connection is better documented. After George III, the firm says it served the monarchs of Britain through nine consecutive reigns. In recent decades it held a Royal Warrant as barbers and perfumers to Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who was a regular client. According to its [Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truefitt_%26_Hill), that warrant ran until 2021. St James's Street is also a short walk from Savile Row, and if you're planning a day of it, our [visitor's guide to Savile Row](https://quietmenace.com/travel/savile-row-bespoke-visitors-guide/) covers the tailors on the other side of Piccadilly. ![Several shaving soap tubs stacked beside a black lathering bowl and a blue lathering bowl on a bathroom counter](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1784098508617-c54d2746272f?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *Shaving soaps from several makers and two lathering bowls on a home counter, the kit a barber's hot towel shave is built from. Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash* ## The shave and the bottles The service people book is the traditional hot towel wet shave. It is a slow, old-fashioned ritual of hot towels, lather and a blade, done by someone who does it all day. The shop also offers haircuts and a shoe shine, so a man can arrive looking tired and leave looking presentable. If you want to do the same thing at home, start with our [safety razor wet shaving guide](https://quietmenace.com/grooming/safety-razor-wet-shaving-guide/). For the open blade version a barber uses, see our piece on the [straight razor revival](https://quietmenace.com/grooming/straight-razor-shaving-revival/). What keeps the name alive outside London is the product range. Truefitt & Hill sells shaving creams and shaving soaps, hair tonics, bath products and a range of colognes under scent names that read like a walk around the neighborhood. There is 1805, named for the founding year, and Trafalgar, named for the battle that shares its opening day. There are Grafton, Apsley and Mayfair, plus Sandalwood and West Indian Limes, the last two being the sort of traditional English barbershop scents your grandfather might recognize. The colognes descend from a long tradition of citrus splashes, which our [history of eau de cologne](https://quietmenace.com/grooming/eau-de-cologne-history/) traces back to eighteenth century Cologne. ## Worth the visit? The firm has opened shops abroad over the years, with Toronto and Chicago among the outposts, and its creams turn up in department stores far from London. But the St James's Street shop is the reason to care. You can buy the same shaving cream online. You cannot buy the experience of a barber working for a firm that was already well known when Dickens walked through the Burlington Arcade. Book ahead, ask for the hot towel shave, and give yourself time afterward to walk down to Pall Mall with a cleaner face than you arrived with. For more on shaving, scent and the old London houses, see our [grooming essentials hub](https://quietmenace.com/topics/grooming-essentials/), our [heritage brands hub](https://quietmenace.com/topics/heritage-brands/) and the rest of the [Grooming section](https://quietmenace.com/grooming/). --- Filed under: [Grooming Essentials](https://quietmenace.com/topics/grooming-essentials/), [Heritage Brands](https://quietmenace.com/topics/heritage-brands/), [Fragrance](https://quietmenace.com/topics/fragrance/) Hero image: Photo by Intrepid on Unsplash (Unsplash License)