The 1879 name takes a bench in South Wales, where every Beesley will now be finished and regulated, and a Chelsea gunroom that doubles as a club for Beesley owners

CHELSEA, LONDON — 3 September 2026 — Frederick Beesley, the London gunmaking name founded in 1879, has opened a workshop in South Wales and a shop at 488 Kings Road in Chelsea. Every gun the house builds will now be finished, regulated and signed off on its own British bench, and sold from its own London door.

The workshop is run by Scott Morgan, Head Beesley Gunsmith, a trained engineer by trade who learned his gunsmithing at UK Gun Repairs in Somerset and has been at the bench for twenty years. The work is overseen by Brad Davis, Head of Production, who represented Great Britain for over a decade at world-class level in the Olympic shotgun disciplines and brings an unusually deep understanding of sporting shotguns, and by Tom Ward, director of the house. The bench will also carry out repair, servicing and regulating for clients of Beesley and its sister house, London Gun Company, on guns of any make.

Beesley guns are designed, specified and controlled by the house, gun by gun rather than to a standard pattern. Actions and barrels are built in Italy to that specification, each gun a unique project. Every gun is now finished and regulated at the South Wales workshop — which means the bench that brings a new gun to its final specification is the bench that will service it for the rest of its working life.

Beesley has until now occupied a space within London Gun Company’s shop at 498 Kings Road. At 488 it takes premises of its own — the first London address given over to Beesley guns alone since the firm left 2 St James’s Street in 1939. The premises carry Beesley guns and nothing else: the full range on view, and the room in which a client designs and orders their own. It is also a club for Beesley owners, with a bar and a cigar lounge, where members can bring guests and spend an evening among other people who shoot. London Gun Company’s shop further along the Kings Road continues to handle the armoury, servicing, valuations and sales across all makes.

The house’s sporting agency has been named the Beesley Sporting Agency and is headed by Miles Orford, who joined in 2020 and arranges in excess of 100 days a year across Britain, Europe, the Americas and Africa. Each day is curated around the client — quarry, location and accommodation, transport, permits and ammunition, and where it is called for, helicopters, cigars, socks and toothpaste. Clients are welcomed at 488 Kings Road to plan a season or a trip in person. Between the gunroom, the club and the agency, a client can commission a gun, store it, maintain it and arrange the days it is used on from a single address.

In the United States, F. Beesley USA is run from Manhattan by Ian Harrison, formerly director of Beretta’s premium gun division, who was appointed VP of North American Sales in May 2025. He is a salaried employee of the house rather than an agent or distributor, covering the country in person, handling both sales and aftercare for American clients, and representing Beesley at the essential American exhibitions — Safari Club International and Dallas Safari Club — and at private events through the season.

“A gun finished on our own bench is a gun we can stand behind without qualification, and one we can look after for the rest of its life,” said Tom Ward, director of Frederick Beesley and London Gun Company. “The Kings Road is the other half of it — our owners have known each other for years and had nowhere to sit down together. We needed both, and now we have them.”

Frederick Beesley was the author of some twenty-five patents, among them the 1880 self-opening action that James Purdey still builds today, and around 1,800 guns were made under his name. The firm ceased production in 1937 and the name passed through other hands for much of the century that followed. In 2014 Tom Ward and his father Gary acquired it outright — the name, the order book, the Royal Warrant and the archive — and returned it to production.

Depending on the brief, a new Beesley can take up to a thousand hours of handwork and twelve months from order to delivery, with the client’s specification shaping the gun throughout.

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