And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
John Betjeman, Christmas (1955)
The great department stores of London look their finest at Christmas as they shimmer in festive lights and decorations. If you stroll along Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly or any of the other major shopping streets of the West End at Christmas you’ll see the wonder of their architectural forms.
Selfridge’s is the epitome of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century department store design; a classical palace of consumption. A team of architects were involved starting with the American Daniel Burnham, famous for his New York ‘Flatiron Building’ with its distinctive triangular shape, and the Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago. Burnham worked in close association with another American architect, Francis Swales, who mainly concentrated on the front façade. At this point, two British architects, R. Frank Atkinson and Thomas Smith Tait (who also collaborated with Charles Sargeant Jagger on war memorials), entered the scene before their visions were synthesised by Sir John Burnet (another connection with the Imperial War Graves Commission, as he designed the cemeteries and memorials on the Gallipoli peninsula). What together they achieved is a wonder of steel-frame construction fronted by soaring, graceful Ionic columns.
At the ground floor level large, slightly recessed windows allow wares to be displayed through the fine art of window-dressing. Inside, the store has two great atria making light, airy spaces which ensures a sense of elegance, luxury and ease of movement. And luring everyone into this vast store is the clock above the main entrance depicting The Queen of Time standing on the prow of her ship, a classical trading vessel full of wonders to be admired and purchased. Designed by Gilbert Bayes (check out his war memorials in Todmorden and Hythe, and his sculptural work in the Jerusalem war cemetery), the clock reminds all tardy shoppers to get their act into gear… and later begins the countdown to the January sales!
Wander towards Regent Street and at its junction with Great Marlborough Street you will encounter another architectural shopping gem, but one that is the antithesis of the cool classicism of Selfridge’s. Liberty and Co. was established by Arthur Lasenby Liberty who came from a draper’s family and learned his trade with a firm specialising in the import of Indian shawls, before opening his own shop on Regent Street in 1875. In 1924 the Liberty store that we know today was completed. Designed by E.T. Hall and his son, E.S., the pair created a glorious melange of styles. On the Regent Street elevation, the classical remained, befitting John Nash’s grand arcing progression down to Piccadilly. Cresting this main façade is a sculptural group modelled by Charles Doman and Thomas Clapperton (and carved by G. Hardie and Son). It depicts the goods and merchandise of the world delivered to the feet of Britannia, the hub of exchange and commerce. This grand statement gives way to something startlingly different once the corner at Great Marlborough Street is turned, for here the classical world transforms into the ‘Tudorbethan’. Charmingly, this transition is enabled through a bridge which straddles Kingly Street and leads into a dream of England in the sixteenth century, or the frontispiece illustration in a child’s history of Tudor England. The timbers, oak and teak, were salvaged from two old warships from the age of sail. Those on the exterior were carved by L.A. Turner (for examples of his war memorial sculptural work, see Bloxham, Blo Norton, and Dulwich College, as well as the Pozières memorial on the Somme). Like Selfridge’s, Liberty’s interior has atrium rooms, but their feel is very different. These ones are as the galleried hall of a duke or earl about to stuff his pipe with the new import of tobacco. And in another similarity with Selfridge’s it has a clock, but this clock is something from a detail in a Holbein painting or a feature of Hampton Court. In December, Liberty conjures up a jolly vision of ‘Merrie England’, a world visualised in countless Christmas cards and on those Quality Street tins your grandmother recycled for her sewing kit. Liberty at Christmas is real and mythological at one and the same time.
My Upstairs, Downstairs London walk includes these stores, as well as the fine squares and terraces of the West End.
