GP & J Baker

GP and J Baker was founded in 1884 by two brothers, George Percival Baker and James Baker. Their father George, born in 1822, had begun his career as a gardener and distinguished himself designing the British Embassy gardens at Therapia, outside Constantinople, before sending two of his sons to England.

Shortly after founding, the brothers bought the Swaisland Fabric Printing Company and with it most of its printing blocks and its huge archive of pattern books. That is the seed of what the company now describes as the largest privately owned textile archive in the world. By 1893 it was employing leading Arts and Crafts designers under an in-house studio led by W J Thomas, and around 1910 George Percival Baker bought over four hundred antique block prints from the Holzach studio in Paris.

The company holds a Royal Warrant to King Charles III, forty-two years after its first, granted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1982. It sits with Threads, Baker Lifestyle, Kravet, Lee Jofa and Brunschwig and Fils rather than with any British group, and Companies House lists Kravet Fabrics Inc of New York among the persons with significant control of GP and J Baker Limited.

It is the archive that makes it useful to us. When a customer brings in a chair with a scrap of the original cloth still on the underside, this is one of the few houses that may be printing something honestly close to it.