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| Whiteleys Shopping Centre |
Address: Bayswater, London, United Kingdom
Coordinates: 51°30′52.6″N 0°11′18.4″W
Phon: +44 20 7792 3391
Website: http://www.whiteleys.com
Whiteleys Shopping Centre:
Whiteleys is a shopping centre in London, England. It was London's first department store, located in the Bayswater area. The store's main entrance was located on Queensway.
History of Whiteleys 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 LEO Computers Ltd. in the 1950s and later by International Computers Limited (ICL) for offices and training facilities in the 1970s. The offices were named "Hartree House" after Douglas Rayner Hartree in recognition of his part in the LEO Computers story.
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.[citation needed] The ground-floor fountain, with its inspiring sculpture, certainly disappeared unannounced around that time. 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. This year a new vintage store, Victory Vintage, opened on the first floor opposite GAP. One of the largest retail spaces on the first floor was formerly operated by Borders, but is now part of the Toys-R-Us chain. Other stores include branches of clothing stores Zara and French Connection and 'The Real China.'........Wikipedia >>
