There is a green book in our office, gold-lettered, a little worn at the spine. On the cover it says Harris & Dixon — Established 1797. People assume it is decoration. It is not. It is why the name over our door reads the way it does — and the beginning of a story worth the few minutes it takes to tell.
There has been an H&D in the City of London for a very long time. The name traces back to Harris & Dixon, a house that began in 1797 in coal and ships and grew, over generations, into one of the City’s enduring broking names. The business that carries the H&D name today took a different path: H&D Wealth was established in 1987 to advise individuals and families and look after them for the long term. What carried across was never the ledger. It was the habit of mind — knowing your client, holding their interests above the transaction, and staying for the decades rather than the deal. The name has stood over the careful handling of other people’s affairs ever since — only the cargo has changed. In 1797 the things being looked after were coal and ships. Today they are pensions, investments, and the financial security of Kent families. The work rhymes more than it looks like it should.
The first four dates belong to the Harris & Dixon broking house, drawn from the Harris & Dixon archive. The last two belong to the advice business that carries the name today, drawn from the company books.
The year is worth pausing on. In 1797 the Bank of England, drained of gold by the war with France, printed its very first one-pound note — a year about trust in paper, in promises, in institutions. A fitting year for the firm whose name H&D carries to be able to date itself to.
That same year, a merchant named Goland Burton took premises at 4 Shard Street, in Wapping, on the north bank of the Thames, and went into the coal trade — buying and selling cargoes as they came up the river. Coal meant ships, and in time the firm bought and managed its own. And ships meant risk. Burton began arranging insurance, first for his own vessels, then for other people’s. It is the hinge of the Harris & Dixon story — and the start of the story behind the name H&D carries: a coal man noticed that the careful handling of other people’s risk was itself a trade, and a better one. In 1801 the firm subscribed to Lloyd’s of London. The cargo was beginning to change.
“A coal man noticed that the careful handling of other people’s risk was itself a trade — and a better one.”
You can read the firm’s progress in its addresses alone. From Wapping it moved to the Coal Exchange in the City, and then, as insurance overtook coal, on to Gracechurch Street — following its own centre of gravity from the river to the heart of the market.
The names moved too. For half a century the partnership changed as men came and went — Burton & Bentley, then Bentley, Harris & Dixon — until the two that would last arrived in the 1840s. The Harrises were a Quaker family, and that matters: Quaker commerce carried a particular reputation for plain dealing and scrupulous books. John Tindall Harris was known beyond the City for his published commentaries on the Gospels; his brother Frederick led the business alongside James Dixon.
When Bentley retired in 1846 — the same year the firm became a founding member of the Baltic Exchange — the partnership became Harris & Dixon. The name settled for good in 1880, and never changed again. It is the name, more than a century later, that the advice business still carries.
From 1877 the firm kept its head office at 81 Gracechurch Street, in the heart of the City, for more than a hundred years. There is a Victorian watercolour of it — five storeys of confident stone, a horse-drawn omnibus at the door — and it looks exactly like what it was: by its own description, London’s oldest City broking house, going calmly about its work.
The firm flew its own house flag — a blue-and-white burgee with a red pennant — and its business followed the trade routes of the world. In time the broking business passed to Assicurazioni Generali, one of the great insurance houses of Europe; that historic line continues today, separately owned, as a marine broking business. The advice firm that carries the H&D name is a different business, established in Kent in 1987 — which is why the insurance name and our advice firm are distinct. A Harris & Dixon brochure of the 1990s summed up that firm’s temperament in a line we still rather like: “Proud of our past… committed to our future.”
Here is the quiet truth at the centre of this page. The disciplines that make a good broker are the disciplines that make a good financial adviser. Patience. Plain dealing. A long memory for the people you act for, and the steadiness to be there over decades rather than transactions. That is the part of the inheritance that mattered — and it is the part the firm kept.
H&D Wealth Limited has advised individuals and families since 1987 — and for almost the whole of that time there has been a Green on its board. Bill Green joined in 1988 and spent his working life advising Kent families; his son Will, who leads H&D Financial Planning today, followed him into the profession and became a director in 2019.
Father to son, adviser to adviser. Many of the families who first came to the firm years ago are clients still — relationships now measured in decades.
“The part of the inheritance that mattered is the part we kept.”
In 2022 the firm was joined by two long-established Kent practices — Hellier Independent Financial Services and Carter Financial Planning — and the combined business took the H&D Financial Planning name, settling at The Maidstone Studios. Clients who came in under the Hellier and Carter names are looked after by the same people, in the same way, as they always were.
H&D Financial Planning is part of the Loyal North Group — a group of long-established regional advice firms supported by group-wide expertise in compliance, technology, investment and operations. Our advice stays local, personal and independent; behind it sits the kind of institutional infrastructure few independent firms can access alone.
We are independent and not tied or restricted to any product provider, and our recommendations are based on a comprehensive and fair review of the market, made in your best interests. We advise on retirement, pensions, investments, inheritance, and protection. And we still measure our relationships the old way — the only way the firm has ever known how — in decades, and increasingly in the families who come back generation after generation.
The cargo has changed. The care has not.
“The cargo has changed. The care has not.”
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