London Silver Vaults

The London Silver Vaults opened in 1876 on Chancery Lane.

The underground vaults were originally used by the wealthy to store their valuable household silver, jewelry and documents when they left London in the hot summer to vacation in the cooler countryside. (HOT summer!?!?!?)

The vaults later transitioned to also become a storage house for silver retailers.

The walls of the vaults are 1.2m (39 inches) thick and lined with steel. They have never been broken into. (For those of you looking for a challenge... just saying....)

During the war, the vaults, deep below ground level, became even more important for the safe-keeping of valuables. The building above was leveled, but, the vaults remained undamaged.

As times were tough for people to make a living during and after the war, people began to sell their valuable silver in order to make ends meet.  So the silver vaults transformed from a storage facility to also become a retail location for silver.

As an interesting aside, after the war, the customers with the most money were the American soldiers, looking for "souvenirs" to take home to their wives and mothers. Consequently, vast quantities of British antique silver crossed the Atlantic to find new homes in America.

Back to the Silver Vaults.... Now each vault is its own shop brimming with incredible quantities of high quality silver goods for many extremely wealthy international buyers.

The London Silver Vaults boast being the home to the world's largest retail collection of fine antique silver. If you like silver, this is definitely the place for you.

Besides the usual objects, there were many interesting and unique items for sale.

Including a silver machine gun - that had just sold!

(I will confess, these photographs are not mine. After I took a picture in one store I was told that due to confidentiality I was not allowed to take pictures. Turned out, it was the store with the silver machine gun. To be honest, I never noticed the machine gun until the shopkeeper pointed it out to me.)

One vault/ store I went into specialized in silver goblets. The owner was so enthusiastic and showed me the differences in goblet styles, what to look for, how to determine the year it was made, where it was made, silver content, etc.

The shop owner's passion got me so excited that I came home and told John we might want to consider collecting silver goblets as a souvenir of our time living in England. However, in the reality of retelling the story, including the price per goblet, the idea was quickly scrapped.

Yes, we have graduated from drinking our wine from plastic glasses, however, as lovely as they are, unfortunately, we will NOT be drinking our wine from silver goblets, lined in gold, and made in England in the 1800's.