S. J. Watts & Co was a wholesale drapery business in Manchester established by brothers Samuel and James Watts. Its prominence in the trade was signalled by its huge multi-storey warehouse on Portland Street – described by Dickens as the ‘merchant palace of Europe’ – which was opened in 1858. The leading light in the business was Sir James Watts (1804-1878), who became mayor of Manchester. Successive generations of James Watts took the business into the twentieth century, when the building became more like a department store than a textile warehouse. By the 1920s, it apparently employed 1,400 staff at Portland Street and was headlined as ‘Bankers of Goods’ by The Illustrated London News, 2 May 1925.  The journal added that the firm ‘deal primarily in textile goods and general drapery, and more or less everything except food stuffs and building materials’. 

During the Second World War, the Watts’ warehouse was damaged in the Blitz, but was saved from destruction. S. & J. Watts & Co continued to trade in the building until 1973. In 1982, the warehouse was converted and refurbished as the Britannia Hotel.