Welcome to the
Merchant Taylors' Company

One of the Great Twelve Livery Companies of the City of London

The Merchant Taylors’ Company is a flourishing Livery Company whose members are dedicated to education, fraternity and philanthropy.

Members play active roles in the governance of the Company and its philanthropic duties which they undertake on their admission into Merchant Taylors’. Through volunteering their time, skills as well as donations, our members empower a raft of grassroots charities local to the Company's key areas of work in Hackney, Lewisham, Southwark and Tower Hamlets.

Education comprises a core tenet of Merchant Taylors’ ethos, with prominent Merchant Taylors setting up free schools as early as the early 1500s. Today we work with a number of affiliated schools across the United Kingdom and ensure the provision of opportunities to exceptional students on an individual basis too.

Fraternity and community are rooted in the Company’s ancient beginnings, when members worked together in order to take care of one another in poor health, old age and through unstable economic times. Today, members continue to form close bonds, supporting one another into the future.

The Merchant Taylors’ Company dates from 1327, when it was a social and religious fraternity of tailors and linen-armourers dedicated to St John the Baptist. Find out more about how the Company evolved from a fraternity to a Livery Company here.

With great appreciation for the Company's rich history, and its place in the City of London’s own, the Company and its members play an active role in the ceremonial and civic life of the City.

Merchant Taylors' Company, as with all Livery Companies, offers a fascinating insight into London's past and plays a valuable role in its future. As London has weathered fires, global wars, myriad political changes and plagues, the Merchant Taylors' Company continues to occupy the same site on Threadneedle Street since the 14th century.