Original store

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.

Dressmaking was started in 1868, and a house agency and refreshment room, the first ventures outside drapery, opened in 1872. By that time 622 people were employed on the premises and a further 1,000 outside. Whiteleys started selling food in 1875, and a building and decorating department was added in 1876. This proved to be particularly profitable, as the large stuccoed houses in the area needed regular repainting.

Whiteleys met strong opposition from smaller tradesmen, and also from the local authorities over its grand building plans, and several bad fires in the 1880s may have been caused by opponents. Business nonetheless prospered, aided by a delivery service extending up to 25 miles (40 km), and in 1887 the store was described as "an immense symposium of the arts and industries of the nation and of the world".

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 7 am to 11 pm, six days a week. Whiteleys also bought massive farmlands and erected food-processing factories to provide produce for the store and for staff catering. In 1896 it earned an unsolicited Royal Warrant from Queen Victoria, an unprecedented achievement.

Westbourne Grove fire and reopening

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,^[2] one of the largest fires in London's history.^[3] This was the last of four fires that had devastated the business from 1882.^[4] In his autobiography, Drawn From Memory, E. H. Shepard said the fire could be seen from Highgate Hill, and – some days later when he and his brother Cyril were allowed to visit Westbourne Grove – that "The long front of the shop was a sorry sight with part of the wall fallen and the rest blackened."

Whiteleys was soon rebuilt, but later moved from Westbourne Grove to Queensway.

Relocation

In 1907, William Whiteley was murdered by Horace George Rayner, who claimed to be his illegitimate son, "Cecil Whiteley". After his death, the board (including two of Whiteley's sons) allowed the leases on the various Westbourne Grove properties to lapse, and moved the business into a new purpose-built store on Queens Road (now called Queensway).^[4]

This new store, designed by John Belcher and John James Joass, was opened by the Lord Mayor of London on 2 November 1911,^[4] in the presence of thousands; it was claimed to be the largest shop in the world. The building was further extended between 1925 and 1927 to incorporate the present frontage. In 1927 the store was bought by Harry Gordon Selfridge, an American from Ripon, Wisconsin, who had experience with department stores in Chicago and had come to England to seek new business opportunities. He had built Selfridge's at 400 Oxford Street, which had opened to the public on 15 March 1909.

Whiteley's received bomb damage from an air raid on 19 October 1940. The Second World War air raid damage, along with the earlier fires and subsequent changes in ownership, led to the loss of many of the archives associated with the store.^[5]

In the 1950s the chairman Sir Sydney Harold Gillet announced that the store was too big for its turnover, and converted the upper floors of the building into office space. These 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. Esso Petroleum also rented some of the office space.^[6]

Purchase by United Drapery Stores

In 1961, United Drapery Stores (UDS) purchased Whiteleys for £1,750,000.^[6] In the late 1970s, UDS held a market survey to find out if the losses of the business were down to customer satisfaction. The survey came back positive: it proved that Whiteleys did not have enough customers.^[6]

The department store closed down in 1981, remaining empty until the building was purchased by a firm called the Whiteleys Partnership in 1986, consisting of Arlington Securities, London and Metropolitan Estates, Wilverley & Hampshire Estates and Dartnorth, which was later acquired by the Standard Life Assurance Company. Extensive reconstruction followed; the façade and some interior features such as stairs and railings remained, but essentially the building was demolished and rebuilt. During this reconstruction a tower crane collapsed, killing the driver of the crane and seriously injuring an electrician who was also in the cab of the crane at the time of the incident. Whiteleys reopened on 26 July 1989 as a shopping centre.

Purchase by Meyer Bergman

In September 2013, the centre was purchased by Meyer Bergman.^[7]

In December 2018, Whiteleys closed for a complete redevelopment in parallel with Meyer Bergman's regeneration of Queensway Parade, which faces the building. The project was planned to deliver a mix of street-level retail units, 65% less retail space than before,^[1] with a gym and a cinema, while the upper floors – levels one to nine (excluding level 4) – were to be converted for residential use^[8] and a hotel.^[1]

In October 2019, Laing O'Rourke was announced as the winner of the prized construction contract over rival Sir Robert McAlpine to overhaul the old shopping centre.^[9]

Design and layout

The new Whiteleys store opened in 1911 was the height of luxury at the time, including both a theatre and – on the roof – a golf course. It appears in a number of early 20th-century novels and in George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion, in which Eliza Doolittle is sent "to Whiteleys to be attired". In the late 1920s Dr. A. J. Cronin, the novelist, was appointed the medical officer of Whiteleys, and in 1927 rival store Selfridges purchased the business. The building was designated a Grade II listed building in 1970.^[10]

Whiteleys was re-opened as a shopping centre on 26 July 1989. 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 McDonald's with Rowley Leigh's new restaurant Le Café Anglais and a new food hall in the central mall area. Onsite management claimed in the press that this was the start of a transformation of the building and its shops. The ground-floor fountain, with its inspiring sculpture, suddenly disappeared unannounced around that time.

In June 2008, the ground floor was transformed into what the management 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. Called 'Food Inc', it sold fresh fish, meat, dry goods, wine and meat from the shopping centre's own farm.