Carey and Neilson’s is, we think, an invention of Childers’s. There was until fairly recently a chandler in the Minories – the location Childers gives for Carey and Neilson’s. It was called Potter’s, and it stood there for a hundred years before being taken over, in the 1980s, by Kelvin Hughes. The shop was finally closed for good in 2002.
Potter’s was not really a fully-fledged chandler – it was more of a supplier of charts. But the Minories, the street on which it stood, had a long association with nautical matters. Mrs Janet Taylor’s Nautical Academy opened at number 103 in 1851, and “was much patronised by officers of the Royal Navy and the East India Company”. Mrs Taylor was known as an accomplished astronomer. She published her own stellar and lunar tables, and in the year she opened her academy she exhibited a sextant at the Great Exhibition.
Today, there is only one dedicated ship chandler in the whole of London: Arthur Beale, of Shaftesbury Avenue. We visited the place and chatted with its owner; you can read more about it here.
The Curiously Specific Book Club 