Brighton has always championed the independent. Walk the narrow paths of The Lanes, or head north through Bond Street towards Gloucester Road, and you find a density of small, owner-run shops that very few cities in England can match.
What follows is not a ranking. It is a walk. Five shops, laid out roughly south to north, that you can cover comfortably in an afternoon. Some have been trading for over twenty years. One opened recently. All of them are run by people who chose to do this the difficult way.
We start at our own door, because that is where our walk starts too.
1. Ana Chic
21A Prince Albert Street, BN1 1HF
Our shop is eleven square metres. That is not a lot of room, so what goes into it has to earn its place.
Everything we sell is made by hand: crochet and knitted cardigans, tops, bags, hats and small accessories, worked in organic cotton and chunky wool. We work in small batches, and most designs exist as a single piece. When it is gone, it does not come back. It means the shop is different every few weeks, and it means we can never quite promise you what you will find.
Come in and handle things. Handmade organic cotton does not photograph the way it feels.
2. Orelia
5 Prince Albert Street, BN1 1HE
A few doors down from us, on the same street.
Orelia opened its flagship here in October 2024, and it is a jewellery shop in the proper sense: gold-plated pieces, charms, stacking rings, the kind of thing you buy for yourself on a Tuesday rather than saving for an occasion. You can build charm pieces in the store.
We mention it partly out of neighbourliness and partly because it is genuinely useful. If you are buying a gift and want something that will suit almost anyone, jewellery and a handmade bag cover most of the ground between them.
They arrived on the street after us, and we were glad of it. Two shops give people a reason to walk down Prince Albert Street instead of past it.
We send people there when someone wants a gift and we have not got the right thing, which happens more than you would think, because we usually only have one of anything.
3. Tribeca
21 Bond Street, BN1 1RD
Five minutes north, on Bond Street, in a historic building with a dusky pink front you cannot miss.
Tribeca has been here since 2003 and was the first boutique in the UK to stock Isabel Marant and Ulla Johnson, which tells you most of what you need to know about the buying. It is designer womenswear, chosen by someone with a clear point of view rather than a spreadsheet.
It is a different price bracket to us, and a different kind of shopping. But the instinct behind it is one we recognise: buy fewer things, buy things that were considered.
4. Lavender Room
16 Bond Street, BN1 1RD
A few doors along from Tribeca, and also trading since 2003.
Lavender Room is hard to categorise, which is rather the point of it. Fashion, lingerie, jewellery, leather bags, candles, ceramics, mirrors, prints. An eclectic mix held together by taste rather than category. It is the shop you go into for one thing and leave having found something you did not know existed.
They gift wrap everything, free, and they are unhurried about it. That is increasingly rare.
Twenty-odd years in the same spot on Bond Street, which in retail is the only review that counts.
It is where we send people who want something lovely and cannot say what.
5. Yashar Bish
96 Gloucester Road, BN1 4AP
The longest leg of the walk, up into North Laine, and worth it.
Yashar Bish has been dealing in hand-knotted rugs and flat-weave kilims since the 1990s: Persian, Afghan and Anatolian tribal and village pieces rather than factory production. Alongside the rugs there are kilim cushions, embroidered Suzani wall hangings, textiles and lamps.
This is the shop on the list we feel closest to. Everything in it was made on a loom by a person, in a tradition older than any of us, and the irregularities are not defects. They are the evidence. We work in yarn rather than weave, and at a very different scale, but it is recognisably the same argument about how things should be made.
Go in even if you are not buying a rug. The textures alone are worth the walk.
The walk
Prince Albert Street, up through Bond Street, north to Gloucester Road. Under a mile end to end, and it takes you from The Lanes through to North Laine, which is the fastest way to understand how Brighton is actually put together.
Every one of these shops is run by people who could have done something easier. Choosing them over a chain is a small decision that lands somewhere real: a rent paid, a lease renewed, a street that stays interesting.
We are at 21A Prince Albert Street, open Monday to Saturday 10am to 6pm, and Sunday 11am to 6pm. We also have a second shop inside Churchill Square. Come and say hello.