About Cubitts
The Cubitts rivet, based on Lewis Cubitt's
original butterfly or dovetail joint in King's Cross, London.
About Cubitts
Cubitts was founded in King’s Cross, London, in 2013, with the belief that spectacles should be loved, not tolerated. Wanted, not needed. That poor eyesight is a blessing, not a curse.
Our mission is to modernise the three century old spectacles industry, combining innovative technology with traditional craftsmanship, and a meticulous attention to detail. We make spectacles and sunglasses designed to outlive the wearer. With carefully chosen materials, state-of- the-art lenses, and an array of services to keep frames in fine fettle.
We are a certified B Corporation.
In both objects and people, highly polished is only half as interesting as handsomely scuffed.
When they come to write your biography, it’s the subtlest of details which reveal the grand schema. Tiny decisions of taste which tell us everything.
Born in King’s Cross, London
Cubitts takes its name from three brothers: Thomas, William and Lewis Cubitt, engineers and builders who helped shape nineteenth-century London.
Their work is particularly visible around King’s Cross, where Cubitts began. Lewis Cubitt designed the Granary Building and parts of the railway estate around it. Look closely at the ironwork and you will find small structural pins and rivets holding the whole thing together.
We borrowed the idea.
A Cubitts frame carries a pin through each hinge: a tiny piece of engineering doing an actual job. It became our mark because we liked the principle behind it.
Decoration is all very well. But usefulness is better.
King’s Cross has shaped us in other ways too. It has always been a place of engineering, manufacture, railway arches, workshops, warehouses and people making things with their hands. While much of that history has been polished away, we're rather fond of what remains.
A London spectacle maker
London has been making spectacles for almost as long as spectacles have looked recognisably modern.
In 1727, London optician Edward Scarlett is generally credited with popularising the temple spectacle: lenses held in front of the eyes by sides extending towards the ears. Three centuries later, the basic arrangement is still doing rather well. And we enjoy belonging to that lineage.
Not because we are interested in nostalgia for its own sake, but because spectacle making contains an extraordinary accumulation of good ideas: hinges, rivets, wire cores, bevels, nose pads, lens grooves, bridge geometries and countless other solutions refined over hundreds of years. Most of them are tiny. Many are invisible. All of them matter.
Our job is not to discard that knowledge. It is to use it, question it and, occasionally, improve upon it.
The Cubitts Workshop Philosopher once said ‘nothing is broken, just dealing with new realities.’ In the Cubitts’ Workshop, spectacles troubled by life are repaired.
The Yard
Our home is The Yard, a former industrial building in King’s Cross.
It contains our workshop, optical laboratory, design studio, archive, training spaces and offices. Frames are cut and finished here. Lenses are edged and fitted. Old spectacles are repaired. New ones are designed. Bespoke customers are measured. People learn how spectacles are made.
The Yard brings design, optics, production and repair under one roof, so the people designing spectacles are close to the people making them, and the people fitting them are close to the people repairing them. It is less tidy than a showroom. But much more useful.
Ready to wear. Made to Measure. Bespoke.
Faces are not standardised, so our spectacles aren't either.
Our ready-to-wear collection comes in a broad range of shapes and sizes, so that we can properly fit a frame to most faces. But sometimes most is not enough.
Our Made to Measure service takes an existing Cubitts design and rebuilds its proportions around the wearer. Our Bespoke service starts again entirely: a new frame drawn, developed and made for one person. Both are made to order in our King’s Cross workshop.
It is an old-fashioned idea made possible by very modern tools: accurate measurement, digital design and machining, combined with filing, pinning, polishing, fitting and adjustment by hand.
Technology where it improves the object. Hands where they improve it more.
Spectacles should get better with age
We don't like the idea that spectacles are disposable.
A good frame should acquire evidence of its owner: softened edges, small scratches, repaired joints and the particular fit that develops after years of wear. We think highly polished is only half as interesting as handsomely scuffed.
So alongside making new spectacles, we spend a considerable amount of time looking after old ones. We adjust them, repair them, replace parts, polish acetate and reglaze frames with new lenses.
Sometimes the most sustainable spectacle is simply the one you already own. This is less exciting than inventing a new material with a complicated name. It is also, quite often, more useful. Our ambition is to make objects worth maintaining.
No language has the romantic phrase ‘I’ll stay with you as long as a pair of spectacles’. Isn’t that our loss?
It's on the inside what counts
A beautiful frame with mediocre lenses is not a great pair of spectacles. This should be obvious but strangely, it is sometimes treated as an afterthought.
Optics therefore sit at the centre of what we do. Our stores provide eye examinations, and our optical teams measure, specify and fit lenses according to the wearer, the prescription and the frame.
Our standard single-vision lenses are ZEISS ClearView: exceptionally high-quality lenses designed to provide sharp vision across a wider area of the lens, while remaining flatter and more refined than conventional lens designs.
Their freeform optical design allows the lens to be optimised more precisely for the prescription. In practice, that means clearer vision away from the centre of the lens, reduced peripheral distortion and lenses that can be thinner, flatter and lighter, particularly as prescriptions become stronger.
We pair them with ZEISS DuraVision coatings to reduce reflections, improve durability and make the lenses easier to keep clean.
At The Yard, our optical laboratory edges and fits lenses into frames in King’s Cross, giving us control over the final stage ourselves.
Because the frame is only half the object. The other half is whether you can actually see through it.
An independent point of view
We're an independent company, and a certified B Corporation.
That matters to us because independence gives us the freedom to be interested in things that are difficult to justify on a spreadsheet: maintaining an archive, teaching spectacle-making classes, restoring old frames, developing peculiar pieces of machinery, researching obscure chapters of optical history, or making one pair of spectacles for one person.
None of these are particularly efficient.
That's not the same thing as saying they are unimportant.
We don't think either independence or B Corp certification makes a company virtuous by default. But they are useful constraints.
They encourage us to think beyond the next transaction: about how things are made, how long they last, the people making them, and the kind of company we would actually like to build. There is plenty still to improve. And we hope there always will be.
Thirteen years in, still beginning
Cubitts began with one shop and an obsession with an everyday object most people rarely think about. That obsession has not diminished.
We're still researching old spectacles and developing new ones. Still finding better ways to measure a face, cut a frame, make a hinge, fit a lens or repair something that ought not be thrown away. Still arguing about millimetres.
So while the tools change, the principle does not. Make useful things. Make them properly. And make them worth keeping.
