Our Story
London Mole makes affordable reading glasses that actually look good. We launched in 2020 with a straightforward mission, to fill a gap that had been staring us in the face for years. Every optician, every pharmacy, every shop that sells reading glasses offers essentially the same thing: functional, forgettable frames you wouldn't choose to wear if you had any other option.
We thought that was wrong. Millions of people wear reading glasses every day. They sit on your face in plain sight. There is absolutely no reason they should be boring.
London Mole is designed by the team behind Newgate World, a British design company based in Oswestry, Shropshire, making things worth looking at since 1990. Each frame is designed by us, tooled by us, and made by specialist eyewear manufacturers we trust. From around £18 a pair. Cool enough to keep one in every room.
Chapter One - Affordable Reading Glasses That Actually Look Good
London Mole was born from a very specific kind of frustration. Not a boardroom frustration. A painterly one. The kind that hits you at the end of a brush, when the line you've been trying to paint straight keeps coming out wrong, and you have absolutely no idea why.
Jim Read, who founded London Mole alongside the broader Newgate World family of brands, has been making things all his life. Clocks, watches, eyewear, games, umbrellas. But away from the business, he paints. Oil on canvas, large format pieces, bold blocks of colour and clean architectural lines. He started in his forties, working in a converted chicken shed in Shropshire, and eventually produced more than fifty paintings, exhibiting them locally in Shrewsbury at fifty three.
For a long time, the painting went well. Then it didn't. The edges on his lines and colour blocks started going soft. The precision he relied on began to desert him. He assumed it was technique, adjusted his grip, changed his brushes, tried different paint consistency. Nothing worked. Months passed.
Then one day, almost by accident, he picked up a pair of reading glasses and looked at the canvas again.
The lines were sharp. The edges were clean. The blurring wasn't technique at all. It was his eyes.
He describes it as an epiphany. A year of frustration resolved in seconds. He could see. He could paint. Everything clicked.
Chapter Two - One Problem Solved. Another One Found.
The obvious next step was to buy a proper pair of reading glasses. So he walked into Shrewsbury, his home town, and started looking.
He looked in opticians. He looked in pharmacies. He looked in the kinds of shops that usually have interesting things on the shelves. What he found, everywhere, was the same narrow range of clinical, old-fashioned frames. Thin metal rectangles. Oversized tortoiseshell ovals. The sort of thing you'd find in a waiting room. Functional, joyless, and apparently the only option.
He left without buying a pair. But he left with a question that kept circling. Why were reading glasses so boring? Millions of people wear them. They sit on your face in front of everyone. Why had nobody designed them properly?
That question is always how things start at Newgate World. Not with a business plan. With a gap.
Chapter Three - Could We Actually Make Glasses?
Jim and the Newgate World team had spent thirty years designing and manufacturing clocks and watches. They understood materials, they understood factories, they understood how to take a sketch and turn it into something people would want to own. Eyewear felt adjacent. Instruments, in a way. One tells the time. The other helps you see. Both sit on or near the face. Both are things people buy based on how they feel about them, not just what they do.
A few months after that fruitless trip around Shrewsbury's shops, the team came across a factory that made eyewear and knew exactly what they were talking about. A long conversation followed. And at the end of it, the conclusion was clear. Yes, they could do this.
The design process started almost immediately. The brief was simple: frames that looked genuinely cool. Frames that someone would choose to wear, not just pick up in a hurry because they had no other option. Frames with personality.
The studio began 3D printing prototypes. Hundreds of them. Different shapes, different proportions, different weights and finishes. The team spent a lot of time with frames balanced on their faces, laughing at the ones that didn't work, occasionally landing on something that genuinely surprised them. A shape that sat right. A frame that looked good on a real human face rather than just a design screen. Those were the ones that made the cut.
Chapter Four - The Name
London is Jim's favourite city outside of his home in Shropshire. He spends a lot of time there, particularly when he's in what he calls design absorb mode, wandering through stores, visiting galleries, absorbing the energy of a city that always has something new to show him. London feeds the work.
Moles, of course, are famous for wearing glasses. Or at least, every illustrated mole has ever worn them. There's something both knowing and affectionate about that image. A small creature, underground, peering at the world through thick frames. It felt right. Smart, self aware, a little bit funny.
London Mole. It was cool. It was British. It stuck.
Chapter Five - Launching in 2020 (Yes, That Year)
The timing was not ideal. London Mole launched in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. Physical retail was collapsing. The world was uncertain. Launching a new brand was, by any conventional measure, a risky call.
But the first collection went live online, and the results were telling from day one. The glasses sold. Slowly at first, a few orders a day, with almost no reviews, no advertising, no social following to speak of. Then more. People came back for a second pair in a different colour. Then a third in a different finish. The kind of repeat buying that tells you something real is happening.
The first collection consisted of eight frame families, each available in multiple colours including black, tortoiseshell, transparent clear, red, blue, and yellow, across five lens strengths from +1 to +3. Blue light blockers and sunglasses versions followed quickly. Retail pricing started at around £15 per pair, and the range now extends to around £20. Designer quality at a price that doesn't make you feel bad about losing them on the bus.
Chapter Six - A Collection That Keeps Getting Better
What happened next was satisfying in a way that watches, the previous Newgate World category experiment, never quite managed. Customers kept coming back. Not because they'd broken their last pair (though that happened too), but because they wanted more. More colours. More styles. More finishes.
The collection grew in response. Rubberised finishes were added. Fluorescent colourways. Bolder shapes. Each new family of frames went through the same prototyping process, dozens of 3D printed samples, frames tried on real faces, decisions made on feel and look rather than formula.
The bold London Mole branding on the arm of each frame made them easy to spot in the wild. Customers started seeing their glasses on other people. That visible identity mattered.
Steadily, London Mole grew into an eyewear brand with a genuine following. Not a fashion accessory masquerading as eyewear. Not a pharmacy staple with a logo on it. Something in between, and better than both.
Chapter Seven - Why London Mole Exists
Reading glasses are one of the most widely worn objects on the planet. Hundreds of millions of people need them. They sit on your face, in plain sight, every day. And for decades the default option was dull.
London Mole was built on the belief that there was no good reason for that. You should not have to choose between seeing clearly and looking like yourself. You should be able to buy a pair of reading glasses that makes you feel good, that matches your style, that you'd actually choose to wear in public rather than whip off the moment someone walks into the room.
And you should be able to afford to keep a pair in every room, in your bag, on your desk, at the office, without doing a mental calculation each time. At around £15 to £20 a pair, that stops being a luxury and starts being just how things work.
That's what London Mole is. Affordable reading glasses that look good, made by people who care what things look like, priced so you can have more than one pair without thinking twice.
The mole approves. And he's got excellent taste in eyewear.
Part of the Newgate World Family
London Mole is one of four brands made by the same team in Oswestry, Shropshire.
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Newgate Clocks Premium British designer clocks. The original brand, designing since 1990. |
Jones Clocks Affordable British wall clocks with real personality. Cheerful, well-designed, and great value. |
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Funkstar Hardware Fun, design-led lifestyle products. Umbrellas, games, and more. |