Selfridges, Oxford Street, London

 As buyers flock to online retailers for Black Friday sales, we take a look back at a time when shopping wasn’t just for buying stuff. It was an EXPERIENCE 🛍️

Back in the early 1900s, shopping wasn’t seen as a glamorous leisure activity. 

Until Selfridges came along.

Selfridges was the brainchild of American-born businessman Harry Gordon Selfridge.

Selfridge moved to London in 1906, but found the city’s department stores lacked the dazzling drama of their American rivals. He had bigger ideas. 

He found a site on Oxford Street and, in 1909, opened a new kind of department store. On opening day, 90,000 people visited the store. Over the first week, visitor numbers topped one million.

The store opened with the motto “everyone is welcome”. Traditional Oxford Street stores mostly served a middle class clientele. But here, social divisions were blurred as the wealthy and the working class browsed side by side. Selfridges had a particularly popular ‘bargain basement’, which it claimed was “easier to enter… than to leave”.

It also offered shoppers leisure and socialising experiences, including a restaurant, rest areas, an American-style soda fountain and a library. It was “a city epitomised”, according to the Daily News.

Selfridges gave its customers glamour and entertainment – and kept them in the store for as long as possible. 

And its still standing strong on Oxford Street over 100 years later. Read on to discover more about one of London's most iconic department stores: https://bit.ly/4i46GcG