Peter Jones (department store)

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View of the building.

Peter Jones is a large, established and exclusive department store in central London. It is owned by John Lewis Partnership and located in Sloane Square, Chelsea.

[edit] History

The shop is named after Peter Rees Jones (1843–1905), the son of a Carmarthenshire hat manufacturer.

After serving an apprenticeship with a draper in Carmarthen he moved to London and established a small shop in Hackney. He then moved to central London, and in 1877 moved to 4–6 Kings Road the site of the present store. The business flourished, soon expanding to cover most of the block.

After a period of troubled trading and the death of Peter Jones, the store was purchased by John Lewis of the eponymous Oxford Street store, who handed it over to his son John Spedan Lewis in 1914. Soon after it became part of the John Lewis profit sharing partnership.

The present building, which occupies an entire island site on the west side of Sloane Square, was built between 1932 and 1936 to designs by William Crabtree of the firm of Slater, Crabtree and Moberly.^[1] The building is the first modern-movement use of the glass curtain wall in Britain (not, as is often claimed, the first per se, as late-Victorian examples in the gothic revival style exist) and is now a Grade II* listed building.

The store completed a lengthy refurbishment by^[2] John McAslan and Partners in 2004.

The Previous Managing Director was Simon Fowler, however, he has gone onto pastures new as Managing Director of the Oxford Street branch. The newly appointed MD is Tony Wheeler.^[3]