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Notable Landmarks · London, Greater London

First Ann Summers Shop

The Edgware Road sex shop that launched the Ann Summers name in 1970 was aimed chiefly at men. Jacqueline Gold's women-led party-plan model from 1981 transformed it into a mainstream retail empire.

StatusDocumented history
Dateopened 9 September 1970; Gold family acquisition 1971–72; party plan from 1981
The peopleMichael Caborn-Waterfield, Annice Summers, David & Ralph Gold, Jacqueline Gold
The siteMarble Arch area (original premises no longer trading as such)
Coordinates51.51360, -0.15890 (confidence 2/5)

The story

The first Ann Summers shop opened on the Edgware Road near Marble Arch on 9 September 1970 — a men's sex shop, founded by the roguish "Dandy Kim" Caborn-Waterfield and named after his young secretary, Annice Summers, whom he persuaded to lend her name in return for a directorship. The stock, by later accounts, ran to sex aids, magazines, erotic books, massage lotions and inflatable dolls: Soho's under-the-counter trade in a high-street window. Annice soon quarrelled with the founder and left; the business collapsed, and in 1971–72 the brothers Ralph and David Gold bought it for around £10,000.

The revolution came in 1981, when David Gold's daughter Jacqueline, then 21, attended a Tupperware party and realised the same model could sell sex products to women in their own living rooms — women only, no men, away from the intimidating shop. The Ann Summers party was born. It sold the same goods, but to a completely new customer, in the one place she felt safe, and it slyly sidestepped sex-shop law, since there was no public display. Gold's own board reportedly laughed her out of the room; one director said women weren't interested in sex. She recruited 500 organisers in the first year, and the model grew about 20% a year for two decades.

The Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982 brought in sex-shop licensing, and Ann Summers spent years arguing, council by council, that a store mostly of lingerie wasn't a "sex shop". The deeper point: Britain's most consequential erotic revolution happened not in Soho but in suburban front rooms — run by women, for women.

More stories at this spot

The real Ann Summers, who wanted nothing to do with it

Annice Goodwin took the surname "Summers" and a directorship, then walked out within months after a furious row with Caborn-Waterfield, protesting that she had never agreed to the explicit goods being sold under her name and had not been paid what she was promised. She moved to Umbria, married an American millionaire, and died there in 2012 — her name still glowing over British high streets she had long since disowned.

A gun-runner's shop

"Dandy Kim" Caborn-Waterfield was a genuine post-war adventurer: a bit-part actor, a black-market nylons dealer, a man who ran guns to Cuba, dated Diana Dors, and served a French prison sentence for a Riviera safe-robbery. The founding of Britain's most famous chain of sex shops was, for him, almost a footnote to a career of glorious disrepute — which is perhaps why he handed it his secretary's name rather than his own.

The bullet in the post

Jacqueline Gold's transformation of Ann Summers into a business "run by women, for women" met resistance that went well beyond a sceptical boardroom. She has said that as she pushed the party plan and dragged the brand toward the high street, she received a bullet through the post. She kept going, was made CBE in 2016 for services to women in business, and led the company until her death in 2023.

Sources

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Documented history

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