Palace opens Soho flagship with in-store-only Burberry capsule

Palace opens its new London flagship at 8 Poland Street in Soho on Thursday, November 5, and the skate brand's home city gets the most deliberately London store it has built. The 2,700-square-foot location replaces Brewer Street, which closed on September 21.

The opening carries a surprise locked to the address: a 10-piece capsule with Burberry, the English heritage house, sold exclusively in-store and nowhere online. Co-founder Lev Tanju said it is cool to buy something from only one store in the world, as shops used to work.

The capsule leads with a honey-beige Camden car coat printed with artwork inspired by the British countryside, plus a cashmere Burberry check scarf carrying Palace branding. A hooded jacket, shirts, T-shirts, a cap, shorts and a skateboard in house check fill out the rest.

A polo embroidered with a Poland Street graphic completes the collaboration. The store also offers a London-exclusive line of apparel and accessories embossed with the number eight, a reference to the address, with a subtle nod to the brand's triangle logo.

Burberry is the house that invented gabardine in 1879 and dressed polar expeditions before it ever dressed a runway. Tanju said the link came simply from reaching out: Palace is a London brand, it wanted something really special, and people it knew at Burberry loved the idea.

A museum built from the archive

The interior draws on two pillars of British architecture. Seoul-based designer Steve Oh, who has built Palace stores across Asia, was struck by the long, narrow plan and the skylights, and said the space felt like the British Museum's Great Court.

Oh divided the plan into connecting rooms in the manner of a museum enfilade, each balancing Palace's usual palette of mirrors, brushed stainless steel, white marble, oak and exposed concrete. The oversize storefront windows are recast as stained-glass panels carrying Palace artwork.

The rear window holds stained-glass panels designed by Palace and crafted by Scottish studio Pavilion Pavilion, with praying skeleton hands, gothic typography and a figure-of-eight. Tanju called it a tongue-in-cheek religious twist that makes the space feel a bit sacred.

Archive photographs and references to the original Brewer Street shop are treated as curated exhibits, not decor. Concrete and galvanized steel form an industrial base, softened by light oak panelling, parquet floors and white walls, while P-shaped marble tiles replicate those in the first store.

A recreation of the first shop's black-and-white marble floor marks the entrance. A Rolls-Royce grille that once hung in the South London restaurant of Tanju's grandfather now hangs in the new space, near a life-size portrait of Elizabeth II presiding over the fitting room.

Unfinished stone plinths act as display points, a mirrored deck wall meets shoppers at the door, and recessed deck displays are set into the concrete columns. An LED video wall rises through both floors, linking them visually. The door handle is rendered in Palace artwork and doubles as the door number.

The furniture doubles as a history lesson. A raw oak bench and stool take the shape of the Tri-Ferg, the logo designer Fergus Purcell created as a play on the Penrose triangle, and Victoria benches recall the skate spot beside the former New Scotland Yard.

When anti-skaters forced the Victoria Benches' removal in 2019, Tanju and Gareth Skewis paid a builder for three. One is in the store, and two more are at Manor Place, the free indoor skatepark and community hub Palace and Nike opened in a restored 19th-century bathhouse in South London last year.

The retail footprint behind it

Poland Street joins a footprint spanning New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Apgujeong, Hongdae, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. In 2026 alone Palace opened its first Hong Kong store in Causeway Bay and its first mainland China store in Shanghai's Zhangyuan compound.

It also opened its first permanent Southeast Asian flagship in Singapore and, over the summer, a 1,500-square-foot Seoul store on the first floor of Lotte World Mall in Songpa, beside Lotte World Tower, South Korea's tallest building at 555 meters and 123 stories.

Founded in 2009 by Tanju and Skewis, who met skating around London's Southbank Centre, Palace has grown from an underground label into a global name. Soho is Oh's first project in Europe and the brand's only store outside Asia spanning two floors. Its first shop opened a decade ago on Brewer Street.