London / St James's

St James's is a trade district before it is a smoking one. Between Piccadilly and Pall Mall sit the gentlemen's clubs, the hatters, the shirtmakers, the wine merchants and, since 1787, a tobacconist at 19 St James's Street trading under the name Robert Lewis. Fribourg and Treyer had already opened on the Haymarket in 1720. The concentration was not accidental: the clubs supplied a resident clientele with accounts, and an account is what made cigar retailing work, since customers bought by the box, left stock in the shop and drew on it.

Cigars themselves arrived properly with the army. British officers returning from the Peninsular War brought the habit back from Spain, and by the 1820s and 1830s the cigar divan was a London institution. Victorian and Edwardian St James's turned that into a hierarchy of taste: shipping marks, cabinet selections, factory codes and the practice of laying cigars down to age. The most famous customer, Winston Churchill, kept an account at Robert Lewis from the early 1900s, and his ledger and chair are still in the basement of number 19. The vitola named after him remains the most recognizable cigar shape in the world.

The modern chapter is legal. On 1 July 2007 the English smoking ban took effect, but the regulations carried a specific exemption: the shop of a specialist tobacconist may cease to be smoke-free while cigars or pipe tobacco are being sampled, provided the room is fully enclosed, separately ventilated and clearly signed. That clause is why St James's still has indoor sampling rooms while ordinary pubs do not, and why an unremarkable back room on a Mayfair street is one of the few places in Britain where a cigar can lawfully be lit indoors in a shop.

London has never grown or rolled cigars at scale; its business is import, grading, storage and ageing. British merchants took delivery of Havanas in cabinet and dress boxes, held them in cool cellars and sold them years later, and the London market developed the vocabulary of cabinet selection, shipping mark and box code that collectors still use. The United Kingdom has remained one of the largest markets for Cuban cigars outside Cuba, distributed through a single exclusive importer, and Regional Editions made specifically for Britain are a modern extension of that relationship.

The defining institution is the account rather than the counter: a customer's cigars are kept in the shop's cellar, drawn down over years, and billed rather than bought. That habit produced ledgers that are now historical documents, and a shop culture in which the merchant records preferences and the customer defers to them. The 2007 ban split the district in two, between the sampling rooms that survived under the specialist tobacconist exemption and the clubs and restaurants that did not, pushing much of the social smoking onto heated hotel terraces. Royal warrants, seven of them awarded to the Fox and Lewis business since 1787, remain part of the street's self-presentation.