A luxury fashion brand loved by celebrities including Margot Robbie, Alexa Chung and Cillian Murphy is setting up shop in a former bank on Marlow High Street.
R. M. Williams, a leatherwear company founded in the outback nearly 100 years ago, has applied for permission to install a branded sign outside the former HSBC unit at number 46 on the high street, months after plans to ‘revitalise’ the building were given the green light by Bucks Council.
The high-end company has a wide variety of leather boots and shoes, seen recently on Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy and well as well-known Aussies Margot Robbie and Hugh Jackman, but the Marlow store will mark only its third branch in the UK and its first outside London.
Developers FirstPlan, who submitted the signage application on behalf of R. M. Williams, said the business owners were “looking forward to bringing its unique retail offer to Marlow (and) building on the success of its London stores”.
If the company obtains advertising consent, the new hanging sign bearing its logo would be the finishing touch to a conversion of the unit’s ground floor into a sparkling new retail space that kicked into gear back in February after property investor and developer Sorbon Estates acquired permission to ‘revitalise’ the former bank.
Sorbon, which owns multiple units in Marlow, acquired a freehold interest in the building following the closure of HSBC, one of the town’s last in-person banking branches, last July.
In the last four months, the property investor has been hard at work subcontracting workers to install a replacement shopfront and new first-floor windows, among other amendments, to boost its appeal to prospective new tenants.
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George Andrews, Assistant Land and Planning Manager at Sorbon said the plans would “make the high street more vibrant and attractive to the public” by “revitalising the old bank into a fresh new space for retail”.
The new hanging sign would be fixed to brickwork on the shopfront in a similar style to the adjacent Pizza Express and comply with the visual precedent set by other businesses in the town centre.
R. M. Williams was founded by Reginald Murray Williams in South Australia back in 1932, and originally sold leather boots designed to be hardy enough to weather the heat and harshness of the outback.
After growing in size and popularity throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the company began selling sweatshirts, jackets, bags and belts alongside its signature footwear line and opened its first London store on Bond Street in 1989.
Decades on, the luxury brand – generally priced in the low hundreds – has extended to a second UK branch in Soho as well as sites in New Zealand and the US and over 60 on its home turf.
Sorbon Estates declined to say when the new store might open its doors and R. M. Williams has been contacted for comment.
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