The following is a surprising discovery from Emily Cockayne’s book ‘Rummage’.

“Deciding to establish new premises in the early 1920s, the owners of Liberty’s department store in London opted for a Tudor pastiche. Teak for the external timbers and oak for the interior were inherited from 2 old men-of-war: HMS Hindustan, launched in 1841 (and sold to the scrap metal merchants JN Garnham & Sons in 1921), and HMS Impregnable, which had been the same length as Liberty’s shop front on Argyll Place. Shop floors were made from ship decks. The Sphere congratulated Liberty’s for enhancing London’s street scene with an English shop which echoed ‘bygone days when the ancient guilds of the craftsmen and the merchant venturers displayed in the beautiful gabled buildings of old London […] the treasures for which they had sailed so far’. In this case, at least part of the treasure was the ships themselves.”