The shop quickly expanded to 7 and 8 Charing Cross whilst acquiring premises on Trinity Place for printing works.

[5] The store on Long Acre in Covent Garden, central London, was the location of the company's printing business[4] before the entire operation moved there in January 1901.

[5] Stanfords was hit by an incendiary bomb on the night of 15 April 1941 and it only survived due to the thousands of Ordnance Survey maps tightly stacked on the shop's upper floors, which kept the fire from spreading.

Customers past and present include David Livingstone, Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Florence Nightingale, Ranulph Fiennes, Bill Bryson and Michael Palin.

[6] In Arthur Conan Doyle's 1902 novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes orders from Stanfords (named Stamfords in the story) a large-scale Ordnance Survey map of a suspected crime-scene on Dartmoor.