Welcome to Alchemy - The oldest established headshop in London

"I'd started off in the West End before as an anarchist trader selling psychedelic posters in the late sixties you see because I did not know how to make a living. I ended up in the Portobello Road, making chokers, selling chillums, first because that was the in thing with beads.

I had traded at many festivals so it was natural for
me and I started to be a sort of medicine head, with
Tiger Balm, Herbs and I believed in cannabis as
the 'healing herb'. Almost everyone I knew was coming
back from India, bringing all these exotic objects like balm,
and patchouli oil and incense.

I was a long haired hippy with a beard, and the smocks and
the babushas and we liked to trade at festivals, with your cloth out, with your shawl off, laid out and sell."

Alchemy, which came from an event at the Royal Albert Hall in 18/12/68, the Alchemical Wedding

I became involved in organising the event which featured John Lennon & Yoko Ono, and Ken Kesey. People stripped naked at the Albert Hall and made front page headlines in the next day's London Evening News.

Alchemy became a 'head shop' because there had been a head shop in Portobello before me."

ALCHEMY TODAY! (2006 PHOTOS)