Anya Hindmarch Village Launch

While we were Netfixing on the couch, handbag designer, Anja Hindmarch predicted the future- that we will all want to return to the shops and experience street life. So she planned a Village, launched this week.

From Forbes Magazine: The Village, which launches this week, is one of most ambitious retail developments in the UK, comprised of five unique storefronts on London’s Pont Street:

The Anya Café – an all-day café at the heart of The Village inspired by the quintessential British café of old but reimagined with the brands’ trademark humour. 

The Village Hall – an ever-evolving concept space launching as the ‘Anya Hair Salon – Shampoo & Therapy’ to celebrate the publication of the Designers first book, ‘If In Doubt, Wash Your Hair.’  

The Plastic Store – a space to showcase and collaborate with others focused on issues of sustainability, circularity and the reduction of plastic consumption.  

The Labelled Store – a store dedicated to the art of organisation, offering Hindmarch’s best-selling Labelled collection (a system of cases and bags that are, quite literally, labelled to keep you organised). 

The Bespoke Store – the original Bespoke store will continue to offer personalised pieces designed to mark special moments in time and be handed down through the generations. 

All of which are the realisation of a long-held ambition by Anya herself, who I congratulate over voice notes as she sits in traffic on the M4.

"Thank you very much," she chuckles. "It's been in the works for two years and it feels pretty exciting, honestly, to see the dream realised, it's been something I've really wanted to do for a while.”

And while the tail end of a global pandemic might seem like the wrong time for such a project, it rings true for Hindmarch who, similarly, launched her brand in the middle of an ‘80s recession, inspired by Margaret Thatcher's entrepreneurial ideas.

By 1992 her bags were sold at luxury stores in London, New York, Japan, France and Italy, and by 1993 she opened a small retail shop in Walton Street, no more than a five-minute walk from the space The Village now occupies.

“It's been a sort of magnetic pull to go back to where my first shop was in London,” she continues, “and to create something very local, rather than global, which feels like a very appropriate thing to be doing post-pandemic.”