Actually, I’m not sure about the oil rig either.

Harrods is one of those places you’re supposed to visit when in London. The itinerary generally reads something like, “Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, Harrods.” Return home without a Harrods purchase and you’ll have a hard time convincing friends that you visited London at all.

This most English of department stores is owned by an Egyptian, Mohamed al-Fayed, who bought it in 1985 for £ 615 million. Of course, Harrods’ beginnings go back much earlier—the store actually began life in London’s East End in 1834. Charles Henry Harrod started the store as a wholesale grocer in Stepney. In 1849, the store moved to the brand spanking new district of Knightsbridge, just near Hyde Park. In time it expanded, started selling perfumes, stationery, fruits and vegetables, and became a favorite retailer to the great and the good. Oscar Wilde shopped there; Sigmund Freud was embalmed there. Alfred Hitchcock ordered herring from the Food Hall; Noël Coward’s alligator was bought from the pet department. Quite a pedigree.

Interestingly, the most English store in the world has no Royal Warrants (those little crests on packages that prove the Queen eats the same brand of bread as you). In recent years Royal Warrants have been removed due mainly to al-Fayed’s allegations of Royal conspiracy in the deaths of Princess Diana and his son Dodi Fayed in 1997. While this sort of talk may not go down well in polite company, it’s doubtful that the loss of Warrants has made a dent in Harrods’ mystique.

The store is an example of how a brand steeped in tradition and legend can become a kind of museum exhibit. With brands such as Apple or Nike, we constantly expect new innovations; we are disappointed if they don’t deliver something new at regular intervals. Harrods, on the other hand, is a brand that we desperately want to remain the same. We like it to be as staid, traditional, and reliable as the House of Lords, a Cricket test match or indigestion after Christmas dinner.

While having one traditional, unchanging brand does make things fairly simple for the corporate design department, it does mean that the image of the brand becomes locked in a certain epoch—an image that in this case would probably require an act of parliament or a civil war to change. Harrods is analogous to Beefeaters and Kensington Palace—a big chunk of eccentric British history.

The UK, and London in particular, tends to preserve random old eccentric brands just as it preserves random old eccentrics. Brands such as Fortnum & Mason, the Savoy, and Burberry, whether modernized or not, tend to retain a hint of snuff and mothballs, all the while being successful and exciting. London is indeed a modern place to live; it just has a lot of antiques in the living room. It’s hard to imagine these types of brands thriving in any other city on earth.

Harrods can thumb its nose at a world that says “Retail brands don’t work like this anymore.” While sharing the same heritage and longevity as contemporaries Selfridges and Harvey Nichols, its reputation is successful enough to exclude the need to innovate and modernize the brand. Both Selfridges and Harvey Nichols have modern, innovative brands that capitalize on their longevity but are infused with modernity. When Selfridges underwent a transformation of its image, its brand, shops, and retail strategy all became new, modern, and mind-alteringly funky. It is now so bleeding-edge modern that it is impossible to remember what the place looked like before. The Manchester store is a gigantic amorphous purple blob adorned with silver studs—hardly staid and traditional.

Unlike these stores, Harrods cannot make such a change without risking the erosion of its brand. If Selfridges is a funky Britart artist and Harvey Nichols is a young post-punk fashion designer, Harrods is a monocle-wearing aristocrat snoozing with the Sunday papers on a chesterfield sofa. Nice and comfy.

However, being a museum piece doesn’t have to mean old-fashioned. Harrods stocks new fashion and shows innovation in product presentation. Its marketing is contemporary with Harvey Nichols or the innovative furniture retailer Heal’s.

It’s difficult to imagine a London without Harrods. The fabulous would be forced to buy cheese from Asda or Tesco, billions of pounds of tourism would be lost, Knightsbridge would probably cave in, and London itself would be a little closer to being like everywhere else.

Jackson Mahr is a director of Kodimedia, a London-based design and brand consultancy.