Andertons Brand Guidelines: Guildford’s 1964 Family Music Shop and Its Video Presenters

A father and son open a shop in 1964.

Andertons Music Co. opened in Guildford, Surrey, in 1964. Its founders were Harry Anderton and his son Peter Anderton, Surrey Live reported in July 2014, when the shop marked its 50th year. In that report Peter’s son, managing director Lee Anderton, said his grandfather had served with the Flying Squad in London, that his father had worked in a music shop on the Fulham Road, and that both were keen drummers. A company profile published in March 2024 by Gretsch, the drum and guitar maker, dates the opening to 6 June 1964 and describes father and son as semi-professional drummers.

The first shop stood in Stoke Fields, Surrey Live said. When York Road became a main traffic route in the 1970s the shop found itself on a side street, and a poster for it added the words “now harder to find than ever.” Gretsch’s profile says the shop moved to larger premises in 1968 and began to carry electronic organs and keyboards, adding synthesizers and stage lighting in the early 1970s. In the 1960s, according to Surrey Live, Harry Anderton’s peers included the guitarist Bert Weedon and the amplifier maker Jim Marshall. In 1990 the business moved to its present building on Woodbridge Road, which the company describes as a few minutes from the town’s train and bus stations and under an hour from central London.

Lee Anderton joined the business full-time as the 1990s began, Gretsch says. In 2014 he told Surrey Live that for most of its history the shop had been a modest family business, and that it changed as music became a mass leisure activity and as online retail arrived. At that point it employed 65 people, against a handful 25 years earlier, and he said the family had never wanted to open more stores outside Guildford. English Wikipedia describes Andertons as a family-owned partnership now led by the third generation, and the company still calls itself family-run.

A website, a refit and a YouTube channel.

The company says it launched a website customers could buy from in 2001, and that a major refurbishment in 2011 enlarged the Guildford store into departments for guitars and basses, drums, keyboards and pro audio, with practice rooms. Gretsch’s profile credits Lee Anderton with moving the shop into online selling early.

Video became the brand’s public face. Andertons started its YouTube channel in 2007, according to both English Wikipedia and Gretsch. The company calls the output Andertons TV and now runs separate channels for each department. In November 2018 The Guildford Dragon put the main channel at more than 100 million views and about 486,000 subscribers; English Wikipedia gives more than one million subscribers in September 2025.

The presenters are part of the identity. English Wikipedia names Lee Anderton, known on the channel as “The Captain,” with Rob Chapman and Peter Honoré, “Danish Pete.” Gretsch describes the videos as built around conversation and community rather than repeating manufacturers’ feature lists, and notes that Lee Anderton’s interview series “The Captain Meets” included a 2023 episode with Fred Gretsch.

Trade recognition followed. At the Summer NAMM show in Nashville in June 2018, the National Association of Music Merchants named Andertons Music Co. its Dealer of the Year and also gave it its award for online engagement, according to NAMM’s announcement of its 2018 Top 100 Dealer awards; Music Inc. dated the ceremony to 29 June. The Guildford Dragon reported on 3 November 2018 that it was the first time the Dealer of the Year award had gone to a dealer outside the United States, that Andertons was the only European company in that year’s Top 100 list, and that it was the second year running it had won the online engagement award.

How instrument retailers present themselves.

Musical-instrument retailers often present themselves through places as much as products. Guitar Center’s Sunset Boulevard store in Los Angeles hosts Hollywood’s RockWalk, a hall of fame begun in 1985 in which musicians’ handprints are set in cement, and Sweetwater has built a campus in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with a retail store, recording studios and a performance theatre, according to English Wikipedia. Guitar Center’s website groups its stock by department: guitars, amplifiers and effects, keyboards, drums and recording gear.

Names in the trade tend to be plain. Guitar Center took its name in the late 1960s after starting as The Organ Center and then The Vox Center, and its group includes Musician’s Friend, Music & Arts and Woodwind & Brasswind, names that state the trade directly. Retailers also commission their own lines: in January 2025 Guitar World reported a set of three pedals made by Keeley Electronics as Sweetwater exclusives, and in 2026 the magazine reported Guitar Center’s plan for an in-house guitar brand developed with customer input.

Corporate histories in this trade usually begin with one person: a musician recording bands from a Volkswagen bus in 1979, as CNN Business reported of Sweetwater’s Chuck Surack, or an organ seller in Hollywood in 1959, as English Wikipedia says of Guitar Center’s Wayne Mitchell. Later chapters often involve investors, with private equity firms investing in both companies, and in Guitar Center’s case a Chapter 11 reorganisation in 2020.

The trade has also contracted. In August 2025 Guitar World reported, in an article on the pressure that online selling puts on physical shops, that Sam Ash had closed all of its stores the previous year. This guide sets out what can be checked about each retailer — founders, owners, stores and own-brand lines — and attributes each claim to the source that makes it.

One store, many channels.

Andertons has remained a single-store business with a large online operation. In June 2025, after the closure of Sam Ash in the United States and the insolvencies of several British and European music retailers, Lee Anderton told Guitar.com, in remarks reported by Guitar World on 30 June 2025, that the underlying guitar business was “pretty resilient.” He said that if he were starting a shop again he would steer away from mainstream brands, concentrate on refurbishing used gear and look for smaller makers that struggle to be heard.

The family’s work reaches beyond the counter. English Wikipedia says Peter Anderton co-founded the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford, and the company says it works closely with the academy, which is around the corner from the store, offers its students discounts and supports Music for All, a charity that puts instruments into the hands of children across the UK. English Wikipedia also lists Lee Anderton as an investor in instrument brands including Chapman Guitars and Victory Amplification.

For a design guide, Andertons shows how a single-town shop can build an international identity through people on camera rather than through branches. Compare Marshall, whose founder Jim Marshall was among Harry Anderton’s peers in the 1960s according to Surrey Live, and Thomann, another family-run retailer that grew from one site. For this guide we use oxblood, amber and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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