The City’s oldest florist may not look like much anymore, but it once was the top choice for royal weddings from Diana to the Queen, discovers Anna Moloney

Walking down Goswell Road, just in the north of the Square Mile, you’d be forgiven for passing straight by Longmans Florist. Sat under a concrete overhang of Golden Lane Estate (a Barbican brutalist predecessor), it’s fair to say that from the outside – stacked up with plastic crates and racks of fruit – you wouldn’t assume it was anything much. And yet, right here in the City, squeezed between a dry cleaner’s and a £10-a-go barber, lies the florist that once made the wedding bouquets for both Princess Diana and Queen (then-Princess) Elizabeth II.

Established in 1896, Longmans is not just the oldest florist in the Square Mile, it’s amongst the oldest in the whole country. It started not with a florist, but a barber, Hulbert Longman, who opened his barber shop in the city in 1888. But after starting to sell buttonholes and nosegays as well as giving cuts and shaves, Hulbert fell in love with flowers – and so the Longman legacy was born.

So what happened? Of course, the concrete shaded shop that remains today is not the original. In fact, Longmans has had a peripatetic history in the Square Mile since its first premises in Mark Lane, hopping between homes in Ludgate Hill, Fenchurch Street, Lime Street, Smithfields and so many other City corners that Mary Burke – a florist who has worked for Longmans for over 40 years – cannot even remember all of them.

Martin Longman outside his shop, 21 Fenchurch Street, in 1947

Longmans Florist, on 26 Goswell Road, in 2026

Indeed, when I popped into Longmans this week, after they graciously agreed to squeeze me in during a........

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