The striking storefront of Granny Takes a Trip, on King’s Road, London, 1967; the shop was co-founded by Sheila Cohen and Nigel Waymouth, seen here (second from right) with Jess Down, Rufus Potts-Dawson, and Amanda Lear.

The Shop That Put the Swing in Swinging London

At Granny Takes a Trip, the Chelsea clothing store whose customers included John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and Lou Reed, it was difficult to tell who was a pop star and who wasn’t

By Mark Rozzo

During the sun-dappled London summer of 1967, a King’s College student named Salman Rushdie rented a room upstairs at 488 King’s Road in the aptly named World’s End area of Chelsea. The location—sleepy, vaguely bohemian—was inconveniently out of the way. But it was then undergoing a kaleidoscopic transformation, along with all of London, thanks in part to the outré clothing shop that inhabited the ground floor of No. 488 and went by the eyebrow-raising name of Granny Takes a Trip.

The era-defining boutique is now the subject—and title—of a stylish cultural history by the British writer Paul Gorman, just out from Hachette Mobius. Granny Takes a Trip is itself a kind of charmingly crammed bazaar, chockablock with photographs, illustrations, and no end of tall tales from the sundry rock stars, artistes, and socialites who patronized a retail institution that put the swing into Swinging London.