Whiteleys

Whiteleys was London's first department store, located in the Bayswater area of London, England. The store's main entrance was located on Queensway. It is now a shopping centre.

The original Whiteleys department store was created by William Whiteley, who started a drapery shop at 31 Westbourne Grove in 1863. By 1867 it had expanded to a row of shops containing 17 separate departments. By 1890 over 6,000 staff were employed in the business, most of them living in company-owned male and female dormitories, having to obey 176 rules and working 7am to 11pm, six days a week. Whiteley also bought massive farmlands and erected food-processing factories to provide produce for the store and for staff catering.

The first store, described as 'an immense symposium of the arts and industries of the nation and of the world', was devastated in an enormous fire in 1887, one of the largest fires in London's history.

The current building was designed by John Belcher and John James Joass, and was opened by the Lord Mayor of London in 1911. It was the height of luxury at the time, including both a theatre and a golf-course on the roof. It appears in a number of early 20th-century novels, and in Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion, where Eliza Dolittle is sent "to Whiteleys to be attired." In the late 1920s, Dr. A. J. Cronin, the novelist, was appointed the medical officer of Whiteleys. The upper floors of the building were used by International Computers Limited (ICL) for offices and training facilities in the 1970s.

The department store closed down in 1981 and the building was purchased by a firm called the Whiteleys Partnership, later acquired by the Standard Life Assurance Company. Extensive reconstruction followed; the facade and some interior features such as stairs and railings remain, but essentially the building was demolished and rebuilt. During this reconstruction a tower crane collapsed, killing workmen and the driver of a car.

In 1989 Whiteleys was re-opened as a shopping centre. The current Whiteleys contains a large number of shops and places to eat including Marks & Spencer, HMV, Starbucks and a sushi bar. Leisure facilities include an Odeon cinema and bowling alley. The shopping centre never worked as a retail destination and became much maligned by the wealthy and sophisticated residents of nearby Notting Hill. Since 2005 a slow change of direction began under a new management regime which incorporated substantial physical improvements to the interior, the replacement of McDonalds with Rowley Leigh's new restaurant Le Café Anglais and a new food hall in the central mall area. On site management have claimed in the press that this is the start of a transformation of the building and its shops. In June 2008 the ground floor was transformed into what the management have called a 'foodstore', essentially a larger, more glamorous version of a department store foodhall, designed by Lifeschutz Davidson Sandilands and operated by renowned restaurateur Dominic Ford it is called 'Food Inc' and sells fresh fish, meat, dry goods, wine and meat from the shopping centre's own farm.

Within the current Whiteleys building there is a TV studio, which has been used for British breakfast TV show RI:SE, currently producing The Wright Stuff, Something for the Weekend and T4. All shows are produced by Princess Productions.

Whiteleys also houses the online retailer Net-A-Porter.com.

Whiteleys is mentioned in several books and has appeared in numerous films, TV shows, etc.; most notably

In War of the Wenuses, an 1898 parody of The War of the Worlds, one of the main battles between Earth women and Venusian women takes place outside the original store in Westbourne Grove.

In the cinematic version of Billion Dollar Brain the hero uses an X-Ray machine in Whiteleys' shoe department to examine the contents of a sealed package.

In the film Closer starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen. In the film, the upper floor of Whiteleys hosts an art gallery exhibition, and is the only scene where all four actors appear together at the same time.

External links

• Whiteleys Official Web Site