One of the World's Oldest Tobacconists Just Launched Its Most Ambitious Cigar in Decades
There are very few retail addresses anywhere on earth that carry the kind of accumulated weight 19 St James's Street does. The building has watched empires rise and fall, survived two world wars, and outlasted nearly every trend the tobacco trade has produced in the last two and a half centuries. On June 25, 2026, that same address became the site of something new — a cigar launch that, depending on how you read history, is really more of a homecoming.
One of the oldest tobacconists in the world launched the James J. Fox Selección, a new Honduran cigar brand with packaging that evokes the old Cuban collaborations from long ago. For a house that has always treated its cigars as living artifacts of its heritage, the release is not a marketing exercise. It is a declaration of intent — proof that the story of James J. Fox is still being written.
Two Centuries of Smoke: The Making of James J. Fox
To understand why the Selección matters, you need to understand what the institution behind it actually is. The company's world-famous tobacco business started with Robert Lewis, who began trading fine tobacco in St James's Street in 1787. That address, in the heart of London's most aristocratic corridor, drew a clientele unlike any tobacconist before or since. The shop served discriminating smokers from all walks of life — from commoners to kings — and among them were Sir Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, British and foreign royalty, the officer's messes of famous British regiments, and the leading lights of stage, film, sport, television, radio, music, and literature.
The specific historical details locked in the shop's basement museum tell you everything about the gravity of the place. Churchill's chair — the very one used by Sir Winston while he was selecting his favourite cigars at the store — still sits there. A High Court letter shows an outstanding balance of seven shillings and three pence, for purchases Oscar Wilde made between the 5th of September 1892 and the 24th of June 1893. These aren't props. They are the physical residue of the most famous smoking culture the English-speaking world has ever produced.
The Fox side of the business has its own compelling arc. The origins of Fox can be traced back to Dublin in 1881, when James J. Fox took over the tobacconist's business where he had previously been employed as manager. The Irish retail business survives to this day, still trading from the original shop at 119 Grafton Street. James J Fox opened its first tobacco shop in London in 1947, and then acquired the business of Robert Lewis on 14 September 1992, uniting two of the most respected names in the cigar world. What emerged from that merger was a single entity with roots deep enough to stretch across centuries and an Atlantic Ocean.
The Fox family itself is no stranger to adversity. Freddie Fox, born in 1913, was the fourth of five children and found himself in charge of the family business after the untimely deaths of his two brothers — Stanley Fox was shot dead by armed thieves thought to be members of the IRA in 1926, while Ronald was missing in action over the Dutch coast in 1942 during an RAF mine-laying mission. Freddie, not content with just one shop, took the business from strength to strength, establishing a successful import and wholesale business in Ireland alongside the world's first Duty Free outlet, and developing numerous brands including Punch Nectares, Bolivar Amado, Hoyo Royal Hunt, and La Corona Policromia. The family's resilience is baked into every box that leaves the store.
The company has received seven royal warrants since opening in 1787, the first from Queen Victoria and the last from the late Queen Mother. That kind of institutional credibility is not built through advertising. It is earned through generations of consistency, taste, and relationships — precisely the kind of foundation from which a serious new cigar brand should be launched.
The Cuban Legacy That Never Really Left
To fully appreciate the Selección's packaging and concept, you have to understand the tradition it is deliberately referencing. For most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, James J. Fox maintained bespoke relationships with some of the most celebrated Cuban cigar houses in Havana. These were not off-the-shelf arrangements. They were genuine collaborations, producing cigars that existed nowhere else in the world.
The box design pays tribute to the tradition of developing bespoke lines in partnership with some of the most prestigious Cuban cigar houses. Brands such as Partagás, Punch, Romeo y Julieta, Por Larrañaga, and others created cigars and ranges exclusively for James J. Fox. This tradition dates back to the nineteenth century and continued until the 1980s. The Cuban Cigar Website's catalog confirms the depth of that history — Fox-exclusive Partagás Selección numbers running from No. 1 through No. 9, Por Larrañaga exclusives, Hoyo de Monterrey Royal Hunt lines, El Rey del Mundo collaborations, all in slide-lid boxes, all discontinued as the post-revolutionary Cuban industry contracted in the 1980s.
That discontinuation left a gap in the Fox identity that no amount of retail expansion could fully fill. The Selección is, in a very real sense, an attempt to reclaim that ground — not by going back to Havana, but by reinterpreting the spirit of those partnerships through the lens of contemporary premium cigar production. The choice to honor that era through the Selección's physical presentation is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is a deliberate signal about quality standards and intent.
Inside the Selección: Blend, Construction, and Format
The Blend Philosophy
The James J. Fox Selección is a natural continuation of the Fox House Blend, which itself had established a strong following. The intention behind the new range was to create a cigar with a new blend and presentation while preserving the focus on flavour and commitment to quality that made the House Blend so popular. According to commercial manager Jimmy McGhee, the execution achieves something specific: the Selección is less full-bodied but more refined, thanks to a carefully considered blend of Honduran wrapper, Honduran binder, and a filler combination of Honduran and Nicaraguan tobacco that never gets too strong.
That profile — medium-bodied, precise, never punishing — reflects a deliberate market positioning. The Fox House Blend already held the territory of full-flavored power smokers. The Selección is aimed at the broader range of experienced cigar smokers who want complexity and craftsmanship without needing to be overwhelmed. It is a cigar you can light at noon without committing to an afternoon on the porch. Teams in London and Ireland were heavily involved in selecting both the vitolas and the blend, which means the finished product reflects genuine collective input from two markets with different but complementary palates.
Where and How They're Made
All cigars are long-filler and handmade at the Danlí Cigar Factory in Honduras, overseen by master blender Hamlet Paredes, and rolled using carefully selected Honduran and Nicaraguan tobaccos. The Danlí region of Honduras has long been one of the most respected cigar-producing zones in Central America, with a climate and soil profile that draws consistent comparisons to the best of Cuba's growing regions. For a brand with such explicit Cuban aesthetic references, manufacturing in Danlí carries its own kind of symbolic coherence.
Each cigar in the range is a long-filler construction — meaning no short-cut scraps, no composite blends, no shortcuts in construction. The tobaccos are selected and assembled leaf by leaf, the way premium hand-rolled cigars have always been made. Each box also contains a vitolina — or flyer — explaining the story of the James J. Fox Selección, printed in English, Irish, and Spanish to reflect the truly collaborative nature of these cigars. That trilingual detail is small but meaningful. It acknowledges the full geography of everyone involved in making the Selección exist: the London and Dublin retailers, the Honduran rollers, the Spanish-language heritage of the entire cigar tradition.
The Three Vitolas
The new cigars are available in three sizes, each one a classic vitola. The James J. Fox Selección comes in Selección No. 7 (140mm x 54, a duke format) priced at £35; Selección No. 4 (142mm x 46, a corona gorda) at £29; and Selección No. 1 (102mm x 50, a petit robusto) at £25. These are not fashion formats. The duke, the corona gorda, and the petit robusto are all proven shapes with long histories in the premium cigar canon — formats that have been rolled in Havana and beyond for over a century. Using classic sizing rather than novelty gauges is another deliberate nod toward the Fox tradition of timelessness over trend.
The Packaging: A Museum Piece You Can Smoke Out Of
Of all the elements of the Selección launch, the packaging may be the most carefully constructed. Every design decision was made with the company's historical archive in mind, and the result is a box that functions as both a product container and a piece of institutional memory.
Inspired by the original presentation of the Cuban boxes from those earlier collaborations, the Selección series is housed in slide-lid boxes, finished with a yellow ribbon placed across the top row of cigars and secured to the short side of the box with a dress stud. Each box is stamped "Specially selected by James J. Fox London and Dublin," and the boxes also feature a seal reminiscent of the Cuban warranty seals first introduced on Havana cigars in 1889. In the Fox Selección version, the seal is decorated with the façades of the two flagship stores at 19 St James's Street and 119 Grafton Street.
The effect is genuinely arresting. The slide-lid format alone communicates age and quality in a way that hinged-lid cabinet boxes simply cannot. The yellow ribbon across the top row of cigars echoes the presentation conventions of the old Fox-exclusive Cuban lines — a visual language familiar to any serious collector who has encountered pre-1980s Fox boxes in auction catalogs. The dress stud fastening is a detail so specific that it could only have come from someone who had physically examined original boxes from that era. "The box design honors our tradition for developing bespoke lines in partnership with some of the most prestigious Cuban cigar houses," as commercial manager Jimmy McGhee explains.
Commercial manager McGhee also captured the full significance of the phrase stamped on every box: "The historically evocative phrase, 'specially selected by James J. Fox London & Dublin' stamped on every box has never felt more appropriate or more well-earned." For a house that spent decades as the exclusive partner of Partagás and Punch and Por Larrañaga, reclaiming those words on a cigar they have built entirely themselves carries real weight.
The Man Behind the Blend: Hamlet Paredes
The Selección's credibility does not rest on the Fox name alone. The master blender brought in to create it, Hamlet Paredes, is one of the most storied figures in the contemporary premium cigar industry — a man whose biography reads like a documentary about the global migration of Cuban cigar expertise.
Born and raised in Havana, Cuba, Paredes spent a good portion of his career working at the Partagás cigar factory, where he mastered the art of "free hand" blending and rolling cigars without molds or presses. In 2000, after working as an in-store roller at various Cuban cigar factories, Paredes began traveling on behalf of Habanos S.A. to international destinations to conduct rolling events. It was during those travels that he first built his relationship with the Fox family. During those trips, he became friends with Rob Fox of James J. Fox.
In 2015, he left Cuba for America and took a job at Rocky Patel Premium Cigars. During his seven years at the company, a number of lines were launched using Hamlet's name, including Tabaquero by Hamlet Paredes, Hamlet 25th Year, Liberation by Hamlet, and Hamlet 2020. Those lines gave Paredes an opportunity to demonstrate something crucial about his range: that his palate and technique, honed entirely on Cuban leaf inside Cuban factories, translated with equal authority to Central American terroir. He developed a much greater appreciation for the quality of non-Cuban tobacco and found he could blend it in ways he'd never have imagined, also working with tobaccos aged far more than he ever had in Cuba — usually at least three and a half to four and a half years, sometimes up to eight years and more.
After departing Rocky Patel, Paredes joined the Bond Roberts operation. The cigars for the Selección are made in Honduras at the Danlí Cigar Factory and overseen by Hamlet Paredes, who also oversees Bond Roberts, a line made for the cigar auction platform of the same name. Bond Roberts is a business venture between Rob Ayala and Robert Fox, James J. Fox's managing director, but these are entirely separate cigar brands. The overlap in personnel between Bond Roberts and the Selección is a quality signal — Paredes has now proven his command of this specific factory and these specific tobaccos in prior work, before applying that knowledge to the Fox flagship line.
His background at Partagás — the very factory that once created exclusive Fox Selección lines in Havana — gives the collaboration a historical circularity that is hard to ignore. The man now blending cigars under the Fox name for production in Honduras spent formative years rolling at the same factory in Havana that once served as the Fox house blender's spiritual home. That is not a marketing angle. It is just a remarkable fact.
The Launch: London Now, Dublin on July 1st
The James J. Fox Selección launched at the 19 St James's Street store on Thursday, June 25th, with cigars available to purchase thereafter from the St James's or Selfridges stores. They will then be introduced to Ireland on July 1st at an event in Dublin. The staggered launch — London first, Ireland exactly one week later — gives each flagship city its own moment, rather than folding them into a single transatlantic release. It also honors the distinct histories of the two retail operations, which came together only in 1992 after more than a century of parallel development.
London guests had the Selección cigars paired with The Dalmore whisky on a night that promises to be one to remember. The Dalmore is a Highland Scotch with a flavor profile — rich, dried fruit, dark chocolate, orange peel — that maps well to the medium-bodied, nuanced profile McGhee described for the Selección. The pairing reflects an understanding that a cigar launch is only as good as the experience built around it.
After the launches, the James J. Fox Selección cigars will be available for purchase at either retail location or online within the United Kingdom, with plans to offer international shipping and distribution in the future. That last point matters enormously for American cigar enthusiasts. Right now, the Selección is effectively a UK-and-Ireland exclusive. But international distribution is explicitly on the roadmap, which means the question facing serious stateside smokers is not whether they will eventually be able to get these — it is when, and through what channels.
Where the Selección Sits in the Current Premium Cigar Market
The James J. Fox Selección enters a premium cigar market that is simultaneously saturated with new releases and genuinely hungry for anything that feels substantive rather than promotional. The past decade has produced a proliferation of new brands, many of them backed more by social media presences than by traceable production philosophies or identifiable house styles. Against that backdrop, a release built on 235 years of institutional credibility, a master blender with Cuban heritage, and a packaging concept drawn from nineteenth-century Havana boxes lands differently.
The price points — £25 to £35 per stick — place the Selección firmly in the upper tier of non-Cuban premium pricing, roughly equivalent to what American smokers spend on top-shelf Honduran and Nicaraguan blends from established houses. At those prices, the expectation is quality that justifies the premium over comparable factory output. The involvement of Paredes, the use of long-filler construction throughout, and the Danlí provenance all speak to that expectation being taken seriously.
The House Blend comparison is instructive. The Selección is a continuation of the Fox House Blend, which was unveiled in 2003. That original blend spent over two decades establishing what Fox-branded premium Honduran cigars could be. The Selección is not a replacement — it is a refinement, a different register of the same core philosophy. Having both in the lineup means Fox can serve the full-flavored enthusiast and the discerning medium-body smoker without compromising the identity of either product.
What It Means for American Cigar Enthusiasts
For American smokers who already follow the Honduran premium market closely, the Selección's eventual stateside arrival will be worth tracking. Honduras has an underappreciated claim to some of the finest tobacco grown anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, and Paredes's work with Honduran leaf at Rocky Patel and Bond Roberts has consistently demonstrated the depth that country's tobacco can achieve in the right hands. A line built entirely around Honduran and Nicaraguan tobaccos, blended by someone with Paredes's specific background, has a credible case for being something genuinely distinctive.
The Fox institutional story also resonates with a particular kind of American cigar enthusiast — the one who prizes provenance as much as flavor, who wants to know who made the cigar, where, from what leaf, and why. Fox's documented history with Cuban house blends, its royal warrant credentials, and its role as the retail partner for vintage Havana auctions through Bond Roberts all speak to a depth of engagement with the cigar world that most new brands simply cannot replicate.
The three classic vitola formats chosen for the Selección are also a statement for the American market, where oversized ring gauges have dominated the conversation for the better part of fifteen years. A 54-ring duke is not a small cigar, but neither is it the 60-ring gordo that has become almost a default format for American premium production. The corona gorda at 46 ring gauge is, by current standards, almost aggressively classical. For smokers who have grown tired of the relentless march toward wider and wider formats, these proportions represent a return to sanity.
A Tradition That Has Outlasted Empires
There is something worth sitting with in the broader arc of this story. James J. Fox has received seven royal warrants since opening in 1787, the first from Queen Victoria and the last from the late Queen Mother. The shop has served customers through the reign of ten British monarchs. It has watched the Cuban cigar industry nationalized, fragmented, and reconstituted. It has absorbed the shift from Cuban dominance to New World excellence. And now, in the summer of 2026, it is launching a cigar that draws a direct line from nineteenth-century Havana to a factory in Danlí, Honduras — with a Cuban-born master blender at the center of the production.
"Tradition and history are important for our business," as Rob Fox, the company's director, has said. The James J. Fox Selección makes that statement concrete. Every design decision, from the slide-lid box to the dress stud to the trilingual vitolina tucked inside, is the work of a company that takes its own past seriously enough to let it actively shape its future. That, in the end, is what distinguishes a genuine institutional brand from a lifestyle concept with a logo.
The cigar world is full of heritage claims. James J. Fox is the rare entity that can actually prove every word of its own story — in ledgers, in royal warrants, in Churchill's chair, and now in three sizes of Honduran long-filler that carry nearly two and a half centuries of accumulated purpose in their slide-lid boxes.
