STL Rocks

STL Rocks is a rock, crystal and fossil shop on Cherokee Street, owner-operated by Abbey and Eric, who buy a good deal of the stock directly from the miners who dug it. That last point is the one that matters: buying at source rather than through a chain of wholesalers is what keeps the prices sensible and the provenance knowable, and it is unusual enough in this trade to be worth stating.

The shop carries crystals and mineral specimens from around the world, fossils, and sterling silver jewellery made with stones. The selection is curated rather than piled – this is not a bin of tumbled stones by the till, but a collection assembled by two people who plainly enjoy the material and can tell you what you are holding.

It serves several sorts of customer at once without much friction between them: collectors after a particular specimen, people buying a present, and the metaphysical trade, for whom crystals mean something rather different. The shop is comfortable with all of them.

STL Rocks sits at 2001 Cherokee Street, at the western end of Cherokee Antique Row among the antique and vintage dealers. For anyone working along the street it makes a good contrast to the furniture shops – the same instinct for old and unusual things, applied to objects a few hundred million years older than anything else on the Row.