Happy birthday Boswells. Oxford’s largest independent department store, standing on the corner of Broad Street and Cornmarket, is celebrating its 275th anniversary this year — and there can be few of us, who grew up in or near the city, who do not have fond memories of the place dating back to our childhoods.

For my part, Christmas school holidays always kicked off with a visit to the toy department. Every year there were elaborate ‘rides’, often incorporating sleighs and artificial snow by the bucketful. Wide-eyed, you wondered how they managed to get such elaborate equipment into the shop.

Then came the serious business of present buying: things like wooden pepper mills containing genuine miniature mill stones because — as the elderly assistant in the kitchenware department explained: “nothing else would last properly”.

I bought one of those once, but that was before I discovered the ideal present for my mother was a real sponge, such as I had once seen boys diving for during a holiday in Cyprus.

Cyprus sadly no longer has sponges but Boswells does — from the Gulf of Mexico now, and at a rather higher price than in days of yore.

But the remarkable thing about Boswells is that it still has something of the atmosphere of Oxford’s old stores such as Elistons (now Debenhams) or Capes in St Ebbes, now demolished.

Indeed, I could not help noticing on my last visit, in search of a portfolio case in which to carry my laptop, that many of the customers were young, probably students.

The shop now belongs to cousins Jonathan and Sarah Pearson. They are descended from entrepreneur Arthur Pearson (1869-1926), who bought the business from the last remaining member of the Boswell family in about 1890. It was Pearson’s son, also called Arthur and grandfather to Jonathan and Sarah, who pulled down the 18th-century house where the poet WB Yeats once lived to make way for the six-storey art deco Boswell House we know today.

Managing director Mr Pearson, 55, who has a background in IT management, said: “The challenge for us now is how to modernise the business without taking away the essence of what people love about the store.

“We are not a museum and we must move with the times. At the moment people do seem to like what we offer."

He added: “When I joined the workforce in 1992 we were still stocking those old wooden washing tongs. No point in doing that, I thought.”

Part of the charm, I suggested, was that the shop did not appear to be part of the computerised, high-tech age at all; but Mr Pearson quickly corrected me.

“If it appears like that front of house, that is all well and good but in fact we have a lot of IT. We must, in order to control the sheer range of stock we have.”

Ms Pearson, 52, controls the HR department as well as being company secretary.

She said: “We employ between 85 and 95 staff, depending on the season. They range in age from 16 to 70, with our oldest staff member, Peggy Howe, who has worked here for 40 years.”

The store turns over about £7m a year, but both cousins agreed that, as with all retail businesses, times are tough.

Mr Pearson said: “We saw steady growth in sales throughout the early 2000s. Then the recession hit in 2008 and we have not grown since.

“There was a halt in progress. On the other hand, we have not gone backwards either.

“But it is undeniable that, thanks to the recession, we are having to paddle harder beneath the water just to stay in the same place.”

He added, perhaps controversially, that as a management team the pair always paid for things out of money they possessed rather than borrowing, despite low interest rates.

They simply felt comfortable sticking to that tradition — which some might suggest is the secret of the independent store's survival over the years.

Ms Pearson said: “We like to be safe, prudent. But costs are continually rising. This is an old building and keeping up with regulations is expensive. Last year we took on a store operations manager.”

She added that the store had managed to avoid redundancies since the start of the recession, largely by carefully reviewing the work hours when replacing people; identifying busy periods in specific departments and employing people to work just those hours.

Originally Boswells started trading in 1738 when Francis Boswell established a shop at 50 Cornmarket Street selling leather trunks, suitcases, portmanteaux, etc.

Luggage remains a major stock-in-trade of the business. But the Pearsons were in business in Oxford even before they purchased what is now Boswell House.

Jonathan and Sarah’s great-great grandfather, Frederick, was a pharmacist running the Oxford Drug Company round the corner in Cornmarket already in 1882; but it was not until 1959 that a passage connecting the two separate businesses was constructed.

Here is wishing them good luck for the next 275 years.