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GILLOW & CO. PARTNERS DESK, Victorian walnut, circa 1880, with a gilt tooled brown leather top over nine drawers, panelled sides each with a slide, and cupboard doors to verso, on splayed bracket feet, stamped Gillow & Co. Lancaster.

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Gillows might not be as known a name in English furniture as Chippendale, Hepplewhite or Sheraton, but the firm, based in Lancaster in northwest England, outlasted all of them. The history of Gillows, from the early eighteenth century to the early twentieth, encapsulates the history of English furniture and its manufacture. Robert Gillow began making furniture around 1730, some 20 years before Thomas Chippendale, and developed first a national and then an international reputation as a supplier of quality furniture to the upper middle classes, the landed gentry, and the aristocracy. The company won commissions to furnish and decorate public buildings in Australia, South Africa, India, Russia, Germany, France and the U.S., and it also executed Pugin’s designs for London’s Palace of Westminster from 1840.If Gillows is less of a household name than Chippendale, Sheraton or Hepplewhite, it is because the firm kept its pattern books, the Estimate Sketch Books, a closely guarded secret, for craftsmen and customers only. Gillows of Lancaster boasted the widest stock outside London, and, uniquely for a provincial company in the eighteenth century, had workshops and showrooms in the capital.