Burkitts was established in 1873 as a new retail tobacconists in Hove, Sussex, by a relation of Edwin Burkitt whose family hailed from Grimsby. Having established a tobacconist in Reading before the First World War, Edwin Burkitt took over the Hove shop in 1921.
The following year he established a shop at Chichester, and two further shops in Hove before the Second World War. After the war, his son-in-law John Shelton joined the business and built up a significant wholesale side serving many local pubs, hotels, restaurants, clubs and retail outlets.

The nature of the trade changed during the seventies and eighties. Discounted cigarette sales from the supermarkets, the anti-smoking lobby, the crippling imposition of taxes, the take over of the wholesale business by the multiple cash & carry groups, and latterly the swamping of the UK market with smuggled tobacco products, nearly caused the demise of the specialist tobacconist, both independent and multiples.
 
However the laws of supply and demand have reinvigorated the market for Specialist Tobacconists in the nineties and into the millennium, which has resulted in the survival of existing and the opening of a limited number of new outlets.
There are a number of consumer requirements which are only met by specialists such as ourselves.