Filings put the shortfall to unsecured creditors at £34.7m. Next bought three shops and the brand. The company was registered in Bromley until 2024.

Russell & Bromley Limited has left an estimated £34.7m that its creditors will never see. The figure comes from the company’s own statement of affairs, sworn in March and filed at Companies House on 27 April 2026.

The shoe retailer collapsed into administration on 21 January 2026. It traded from 41 sites and employed 440 people. The name has been a fixture of British high streets for generations, and it has a Bromley connection most shoppers never knew about: until November 2024 the company was registered in the town.

What the statement of affairs records

A statement of affairs is the sworn account of what a company owns and owes on the day it fails. This one was signed on 27 March 2026 by director Andrew Bromley and covers the position at 21 January.

It records:

  • £37,528,494 owed to unsecured trade creditors
  • £2,822,937 owed to 400 unsecured employee creditors
  • £5,625,153 of assets expected to be available to those unsecured creditors
  • £34,726,278 estimated shortfall to unsecured creditors
  • £35,746,278 estimated total deficiency once the £1,020,000 of issued share capital is counted

Two smaller groups sit ahead of them in the queue and are expected to be paid. The document lists 277 ordinary preferential employee creditors owed £121,482, and HMRC as a secondary preferential creditor owed £2,506,450.

The assets side is where the scale of the write-down shows. The company’s books valued its floating charge assets at £38,166,993. The statement estimates they will actually realise £8,253,085. Stock carried at £10,978,184 is expected to fetch £6,743,887. Office equipment, fixtures and fittings on the books at £6,765,560 are expected to realise £100,000. Intangibles worth £5,595,946 on the books are written to nothing, with the brand and intellectual property valued instead at £1. Landlord deposits of £939,777 are expected to return zero.

Bar chart comparing what Russell & Bromley Limited owes its unsecured creditors, £40,351,431, with the £5,625,153 of assets the statement of affairs expects to be available to them, leaving an estimated shortfall of £34,726,278
Graphic by Bromley Online, from the statement of affairs filed at Companies House on 27 April 2026.

The Bromley connection

The company’s registered office was 24-34 Farwig Lane, Bromley, BR1 3RB until 7 November 2024, when it moved to 25 Kingly Street in Soho. Companies House records no other registered office for it before that. The change is itself a filing on the public record (AD01, 7 November 2024).

The street name stuck to the group. Companies House records Farwig Limited as a person with significant control of the retailer from 31 December 2019, and a company registered as Farwig Ltd is now in administration too, at the same administrators’ address.

The name itself is not a place name. Russell & Bromley are the surnames of the founding family, and the register still shows them: the two directors in office when the administrators arrived were Andrew Bromley and Sebastian Bromley, and a Roger John Bromley ceased to be a director in October 2022.

Where the money went

The administrators’ proposals, filed on 12 February 2026, set out how the company got here. They are worth reading alongside the numbers, because they explain the gap.

Management accounts for the eleven months to November 2025 show group revenues of £44.3m and an EBITDA loss of £12.1m. The comparable loss a year earlier was £7.0m. The proposals say the business had historically been funded from cash reserves, and that in recent years freehold properties were sold to pay for loss-making trading.

In August 2024 NatWest provided a trade finance facility capped at £3m, secured by fixed and floating charges created on 27 August 2024. About £2.1m was drawn by the date of appointment. Immediately after the administrators were appointed, the bank used its rights of set-off and swept £2.1m from the company’s account, clearing its own debt to nil. Roughly £0.8m was left for the administration.

Interpath was engaged in April 2025 to review the group’s finances. In October 2025 management identified a funding requirement for early 2026, and Interpath ran a sale process. On 20 January 2026 the directors resolved to appoint administrators, and Will Wright and Chris Pole of Interpath were appointed the next day through the High Court, case CR-2026-000420.

What Next bought, and what it did not

A pre-packaged sale completed immediately on appointment. Next Retail Limited bought:

  • the intellectual property
  • stock held at three shops: Chelsea, Mayfair and Bluewater
  • elements of the stock held at the group’s warehouse
  • the leasehold interest in those three shops
  • other miscellaneous assets

That is three of 41 sites. The remaining shops were traded on for a short period by the administrators with Retail Realisation LLP acting as trading agent, to sell through the stock that Next did not buy. Watling Real Estate was engaged to market the leasehold portfolio, 34 of the 41 sites being leasehold.

On staff: 41 employees at the Mayfair, Chelsea and Bluewater shops transferred to Next under TUPE on the day. Thirty-four head office employees were made redundant immediately, and the administrators say they are helping them claim from the Redundancy Payments Service. The rest of the shop, concession and outlet staff were kept on to run the closing-down trading.

Gift cards already in circulation were honoured, the proposals say, and no new ones were issued after the appointment.

What it means for you

If you are a customer, the practical position is settled: the brand belongs to Next. The old shop website, russellandbromley.co.uk, now answers with a permanent redirect to a Russell & Bromley section of next.co.uk, checked on 28 August 2026. The shops Next bought are in Chelsea, Mayfair and Bluewater. None is in this borough.

If you are a supplier who is owed money, you are an unsecured creditor. The administrators wrote in February that unsecured creditors “may receive a dividend” but that they could not yet say how much. Nothing filed since has put a figure on it. On the statement of affairs the arithmetic is stark: £5,625,153 available against £40,351,431 owed.

If you worked there, the 277 preferential employee claims and the secondary preferential HMRC claim are both expected to be paid in full, according to the proposals. The £2,822,937 owed to 400 employees as unsecured creditors sits in the same queue as the suppliers.

None of this is a court finding against anyone. An administration is an insolvency process, not a judgment, and the figures above are estimates made by the company’s own director and its administrators.

Sources

Reported from documents on the public register. If you are a creditor or a former employee, the administrators’ contact details are in the proposals filed at Companies House. Our other Bromley coverage includes planning applications, house prices and roadworks and travel.