London

Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor to Elizabeth I, would have had little reason to suspect, when leasing a house and gardens from the Queen in the 1570s, that his name would one day become synonymous with jewellery. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the gardens that bore his name were transformed into an estate of streets. Dramatist William Wycherley went there in pursuit of a lady but also found bankruptcy after litigation over his widow’s fortune left him in debt, and Dr George Bate, physician to Oliver Cromwell, died in Hatton Garden in 1688. A bronze plaque above Premier Jewellers at No 5 tells us that Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian patriot who lived there from 1841-2, ‘inspired young Italy with the ideal of the unity, independence and regeneration of his country’. Feature continues

The first jewellers, working in gold and silver, came to the street in the mid-1830s. In 1908, according to Harvey Zeto, a diamond broker with 40 years’ experience in the jewellery trade, their descendants’ numbers were boosted by the arrival of a large cohort of polishers and cutters from Antwerp, the world diamond capital, who set up businesses in the street and surrounding area.

Zeto, 58, meets me in an antiseptic anteroom at the Diamond Bourse, 100 Hatton Garden. Every surface is white. I’m reminded of the jail scenes in Michael Mann’s ‘Manhunter’. We’ve met before. A few years ago I needed to see inside the Bourse for a novel I was writing and Zeto kindly obliged. Some years before that, when his father’s jewellery shop, David Jules, was still in business, he sold me an engagement ring, and wedding rings, too. Zeto explains that rules are a lot stricter now, hence the impersonal anteroom. No ambling across the trading floor on this visit. I wonder if this is in response to the £1.5 million heist at the Hatton Garden Safety Deposit Ltd in 2003.

‘I know guys who lost a lot in that robbery,’ Zeto says, shaking his head in sympathy.

Harvey Zeto entered the jewellery trade as a boy by helping his father, whose business was established in 1945. ‘He was on the road. He had 12,000 accounts around the country.’

When Harvey left school, he joined the business. ‘I was on the road for ten years, 1966 to 1976.’ Then, in the mid to late 1970s, the price of gold rocketed and Hatton Garden expanded almost overnight. ‘People queued in the street with their old candlesticks, their old pieces of gold. There were people in the trade with portable weighing scales paying out pound notes.’

Up until then, Hatton Garden had been primarily a base for manufacturing and wholesale. The public didn’t tend to come down, nor were they encouraged to. A handful of names stood out in the quieter days before the gold rush of the mid to late 1970s: Katz (‘His mother was there; now the son’s there’), Landsberg (‘Established in 18-something’), George & Co, Ullman Brothers (‘They’re opposite. A real old-fashioned shop’) and gold-refiners Pressman’s. A business such as David Jules, which was typical of many in the street, would not have just one ring in a particular style: it would have many downstairs in stock.

Zeto slips a gold ring off his own finger on to the tabletop as he explains. ‘We’d have a hundred of it, and if you’re running a thousand lines, that’s a lot of stock.’ Overnight, because of the rise in the price of gold, a lot of manufacturers scrapped their old stock and many opened up retail shops. ‘The shops went to town. When I was on the road selling jewellery, an article in the shop may have been X, and then when we suddenly went retail, I found I was having to sell them for ten times X.’