Going up: Can Britain’s empty department stores be brought back to life?

Department stores, once palaces of delight and theatres of modernity, enclosed commercial town squares where you might meet, fall in love, get married and furnish your new home, are now none of these things. Empty, cold and bulky, they occupy town centres like fridge freezers that no one will take away, signs of the more general malaise of high streets, their long frontages of boarded-up windows sapping whatever life there still might be.
Yet there are signs of hope. Just as warehouses and workshops were turned into homes and studios when industry retreated 50 years ago, so might department stores. Their low values are provoking creative thinking about their future. The £25,000 Davidson prize, an annual design award for “transformative architecture of the home”, has this year been won by a proposal to make an old Debenhams in Taunton, Somerset, into a centre of communal life.
In Bournemouth stands Bobby’s, founded in 1915, absorbed by Debenhams in 1972, closed in 2021. Its building’s curving facade is a cheerful confection of pillars, columns and cupolas, in red terracotta, white faience and green copper, designed in an off-kilter classical style that doesn’t mind if it’s a bit incorrect, a suit worn by a seaside dandy. It stands on a favoured spot of the town’s charming up-and-down topography, all turns and slopes, formed around the domesticated course of the river Bourne. Exotic Victorian gardens in front wind off towards the beach and the pier.
Verve Properties, the developers who are now reviving Bobby’s, has gathered stories of people like June, who in the 1950s worked in the soft furnishings and dress fabrics department from the age of 15, and met her future husband Eddy, a buyer, there. Or Douglas Vine, a chief petty officer in the Royal Navy, who married Thelma, who worked in Bobby’s, in the restaurant in 1952. Millie Foy, who worked in Bobby’s hairdressing and beauty salon for four years from the age of 20 – in the days when cash was dispatched in overhead chutes from the tills to the accounts department – remembers it as “a beautiful store”. “Everything was luxurious,” she says. “It was city life. The restaurant was a bit like if you go to the Ritz. It had damask napkins, silver dishes and music playing.” There were “models on parade”, sporting the fashion for sale on the floors below.
In those days, she says, “people would come for the whole day to Bournemouth to shop, the hotels were vibrant, there’d be coachloads of people coming from the north when the factories closed for the holidays”. Bobby’s was also a source of employment and a hub of social life. “There was a job for everybody,” says Foy, including “men with one leg who’d been in the war.”
It was one of three department stores that the seaside town still boasted at the start of this decade, all of them (plus a Marks & Spencer) now gone. One is still empty. Another is becoming student housing on its upper floors, higher education being a boom industry in Bournemouth, with retail at ground level. Verve are making Bobby’s into a hive of uses, seeking to build back its past conviviality.
Green awnings have been added, a clunky 1970s canopy removed, and the old Bobby’s branding, including curly, gold-painted ironwork Bs on the balconies, reanimated. On the ground floor is Bobby’s beauty hall, a friendly, relaxed, less corporate version of what was there before, with local products in among the big brands. On upper floors, builders are uncovering bas-relief plasterwork, ripe with decoration, opening up blocked windows, getting the old building to breathe. It is a loose, show-your-workings, not-too-precious kind of conversion with the help of local architects Footprint, happy to combine modern joists and conduits with the relics of past glory.
The third floor is already in use, as the R&D offices of Gozney, a pizza ovens company, its employees roaming around a loft-like, open-plan, work-is-fun space with pool table and table football. Above them is the once-elegant rooftop restaurant, a space with a whiff of an ocean liner, with steel-framed glass walls giving wide views of the town, and in the process of becoming an outlet of dining pub chain The Botanist.
The first floor is taken by Patch, a young company that provides co-working space close to where people live. It currently has sites in Chelmsford, High Wycombe and Twickenham; the Bobby’s branch will open this autumn. The lower ground floor, which opens on to a new “urban garden” at the back of the block, will contain “retail pods” let to local businesses rent-free for at least six months. South Coast Makers, a growing craft market, will be permanently based on the lower level.
Like other plans for reviving old department stores, this brings back an old idea of what town centres should be – places of many different uses, and not just shopping. These new versions won’t all be as glamorous as the originals were in their prime, but they will be less monolithic, more open and lively.
Department stores were once celebrated in movies, TV series and songs, the bigger ones innovators in everything from escalators, electric lighting and plate glass to book signings and Father Christmas impersonators, proud of their standards of service. In 1909, in his London store, Gordon Selfridge displayed the monoplane in which Louis Blériot first flew across the English Channel. In 1925 John Logie Baird presented a prototype of television in the same venue. “Blériot and I were changing the world, each in our own way,” said Selfridge.
Department stores inspired pioneering works of architecture: the exquisitely decorated steel frame of Carson Pirie Scott in Chicago, the art deco palace of Samaritaine in Paris, the curved-glass expressionist masterpiece of Schocken in Stuttgart, the optimistic modernism of Peter Jones in Sloane Square.
In smaller towns they were often local enterprises, once handsome and proud, in styles that range from Edwardian baroque to Festival-of-Britain modern, each with its own character. Some became celebrated. “Maybe there’s someone waiting for me/With a smile and a flower in her hair”, sang Richard Hawley on Coles Corner, about a famous store in his native Sheffield.
Their demise was a long time coming. They lost some of their spark when the mid-century takeovers by big chains started to crush their adventure and individuality. Department stores’ power was eroded by out-of-town shopping centres and then by online shopping, further undermined by business rates, with Covid in many cases delivering the coup de grâce. The Beales chain closed all but one of its 23 stores in 2020. House of Fraser has shrunk from 59 in 2018 to 25 now. The biggest crash of all came when Debenhams, founded in 1778, closed all its 124 outlets in 2021.
In prosperous and historic locations developers are finding viable new uses. Boswell & Co, a family-run business in the centre of Oxford that was founded in 1738, met its Covid-accelerated end in 2020, but its 1920s stone building has reopened as what is promoted as an “inviting luxury lifestyle hotel” called The Store, with 101 rooms and views of dreaming spires from its rooftop bar. There are proposals to make the city’s old Debenhams into laboratories, a use which, not requiring much daylight, works well with stores’ deep floorplans.
The Edinburgh landmark of Jenners, another casualty of 2020, is to be a “fully refurbished department store”, with a 96-room “high-end lifestyle hotel” on its upper floors. It is a “moral obligation”, its Danish billionaire owner Anders Holch Povlsen, who made his fortune with the clothing retail chain Bestseller, has said, to bring “it back to its former glory”. It occupies a turreted pile of stone from the 1890s, a palazzo of merchandise encrusted with an eclectic haberdashery of renaissance-style decoration, that stands just across Princes Street from the Scott Memorial. Its elaborate interiors include a famous three-storey “grand saloon”, glass-roofed and arcaded. All are being restored and respectfully extended, with windows unblocked and ornament uncovered, to designs by David Chipperfield Architects. It is expected to reopen in late 2027.
The Edinburgh-raised Lewis Armstrong, the architect in charge, remembers Jenners as a city institution. “Everyone has a story about it,” he says. “Everyone went for tea there with their gran – maybe just once a year – it was a special event. It was a social space, a public space. Our ambition is to bring back that notion.” For Povlsen, who with 221,000 acres in Scotland is said to be the largest private landowner in the UK, his revival of Jenners seems to be at least partly motivated by his attraction to its fame and history, with the hotel likely to be more profitable than the store.
It’s more challenging, but potentially more life-enhancing, to take on the old stores in less celebrated towns. One of the bolder, and most useful, conversions is in Poole, just along the coast from Bobby’s, where an NHS diagnostic health centre has been made out of an ex-Beales. Its owners, Legal & General, hope this will bring people to the surrounding Dolphin Shopping Centre and neighbouring Kingland Crescent, formerly struggling retail areas that it is turning around. Here, with the help of tenancies that are rent- and rates-free for two years, they have attracted young, independent businesses – shops selling plants, coffee, records, jewellery, fashion, toys, and a graphic designer’s studio.
In Sheffield there’s a plan to resuscitate what was once Cole Brothers, the city institution of which Richard Hawley sang (later a John Lewis, it closed in 2021). Branded the Cole Store, the developers are Urban Splash, renovators of the city’s brutalist Park Hill housing estate; its architect is Simon Allford of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, whose father, David, designed Cole’s dignified and listed 1960s building. It will be a “store for uses that will evolve over time, a container of the present and the future,” Allford says, where temporary and permanent activities can be tried out and adapted.
The hope is to activate the ground floor with a mix of lively independent retailers, eateries and bars, with flexible workspace above, a “pocket park” on the roof with games and sports events, maybe a club in the basement, perhaps some flats somewhere. Public routes are to run through at ground level, the pavements outside to be populated by cafe tables.
The Apartment Store in Taunton, the prize-winning speculative proposal led by young, local architects Studio Saar, is more idealistic than the Bobby’s and Cole Stores projects. Here they dream of a new community of affordable housing for young people, owned in common, with shared social, learning and working spaces and collective rooftop food growing. It is meant to be a prototype, “a defibrillator to the hearts of our towns,” according to Jonny Buckland of Studio Saar. “Apartment Store would not only provide new, sustainable homes,” said the chair of the Davidson prize jury, but “would turn high streets back into thriving hubs for the community.” The jury, he added, “could all see themselves living there”.
Where, in the past, such sunny, hopeful places might have been imagined in idyllic rural settings, the idea here is to bring it to life within the cold, impervious shell of a long, curving, slightly deco building that once housed yet another Debenhams. The plans are some steps from becoming reality, given that Buckland and his collaborators haven’t yet discussed them with the owners of the old Debenhams, who are the BP pension fund and their development partners, Ropemaker Properties. But, as the latter have tried and failed with a humdrum planning application to replace the old building with 92 flats, they might perhaps like to consider a more imaginative alternative.
The Apartment Store idea is not, say its backers, fantastical. The team behind it includes the “socially responsible” property company Stories, whose co-founder Paul Clark calls projects like this “self-interested municipalism” that attracts intelligent investment. Multi-use, adaptive, open-ended, community-friendly projects like those in Bournemouth and Poole are not charitable undertakings – Verve is a London-based company that seeks “to successfully reposition property into higher value markets” – but they see that they have to be clever to solve a problem like a department store. They do, however, need some patience as well as imagination, and funding that doesn’t look for instant returns.
There is, to be sure, much to be done – as of last November, 73% of Debenhams’ former stores were still empty. You might also wonder whether there are enough florists and coffee shops and bright-eyed startups to reanimate every ex-retail hulk in the country, especially in less well-off places. Housing, as proposed in the Taunton plan, is – given that we are in the grip of a well-known housing crisis – an appealing if hard-to-achieve alternative. But these old buildings are too big, significant and in some cases too beautiful simply to be binned, with all the waste of resources that entails. There is the ingenuity and affection out there to get new life to grow from the ruins.