Whiteleys
Encyclopedia
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
.
, 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.
, 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. 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.
, 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
.
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 TV series adaption of The Tripods
, filmed in 1983, the run-down Whiteleys building is used to portray an abandoned department store in 21. Century Paris
.
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.
Whiteley’s Folly by Linda Stratmann (2004, Sutton Publishing) is a biography of William Whiteley, and a history of the store.
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, England. It was London's first department store
Department store
A department store is a retail establishment which satisfies a wide range of the consumer's personal and residential durable goods product needs; and at the same time offering the consumer a choice of multiple merchandise lines, at variable price points, in all product categories...
, located in the Bayswater
Bayswater
Bayswater is an area of west London in the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to the west . It is a built-up district located 3 miles west-north-west of Charing Cross, bordering the north of Hyde Park over Kensington Gardens and having a population density of...
area. The store's main entrance was located on Queensway
Queensway (London)
Queensway is a bustling cosmopolitan street in the Bayswater district of west London. It contains many restaurants , pubs, letting agents, and high street stores...
.
History
The original Whiteleys department store was created by William WhiteleyWilliam Whiteley
William Whiteley was a British entrepreneur of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was the founder of Whiteleys department store.-Early life:...
, who started a drapery
Drapery
Drapery is a general word referring to cloths or textiles . It may refer to cloth used for decorative purposes – such as around windows – or to the trade of retailing cloth, originally mostly for clothing, formerly conducted by drapers.In art history, drapery refers to any cloth or...
shop at 31 Westbourne Grove
Westbourne Grove
Westbourne Grove is a retail road running across Notting Hill, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, a section of west London, England. It runs from Kensington Park Road in the west to Queensway in the east, crossing over Portobello Road...
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
John Belcher (architect)
John Belcher was an English architect.Belcher was born in Southwark on 10 July 1841, London. His father of the same name was an established architect. The son was articled with his father, spending two years in France from 1862 where he studied contemporary architecture...
and John James Joass
John James Joass
John James Joass was a Scottish architect, born in Dingwall, Scotland. His father William Cumming Joass was an established architect in that town....
, and was opened by the Lord Mayor of London
Lord Mayor of London
The Right Honourable Lord Mayor of London is the legal title for the Mayor of the City of London Corporation. The Lord Mayor of London is to be distinguished from the Mayor of London; the former is an officer only of the City of London, while the Mayor of London is the Mayor of Greater London and...
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
Pygmalion (play)
Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts is a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of...
, where Eliza Dolittle is sent "to Whiteleys to be attired." In the late 1920s, Dr. A. J. Cronin
A. J. Cronin
Archibald Joseph Cronin was a Scottish physician and novelist. His best-known works are Hatter's Castle, The Stars Look Down, The Citadel, The Keys of the Kingdom and The Green Years, all of which were adapted to film. He also created the Dr...
, 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
Standard Life
Standard Life plc is a long term savings and investment business, with headquarters in Edinburgh and operations across the globe. It has 1.5 million shareholders in more than 50 countries and over 6 million customers.-History:...
. 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
Crane (machine)
A crane is a type of machine, generally equipped with a hoist, wire ropes or chains, and sheaves, that can be used both to lift and lower materials and to move them horizontally. It uses one or more simple machines to create mechanical advantage and thus move loads beyond the normal capability of...
collapsed, killing workmen and the driver of a car.
Shopping centre
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 & SpencerMarks & Spencer
Marks and Spencer plc is a British retailer headquartered in the City of Westminster, London, with over 700 stores in the United Kingdom and over 300 stores spread across more than 40 countries. It specialises in the selling of clothing and luxury food products...
, HMV
HMV
His Master's Voice is a trademark in the music business, and for many years was the name of a large record label. The name was coined in 1899 as the title of a painting of the dog Nipper listening to a wind-up gramophone...
, Starbucks
Starbucks
Starbucks Corporation is an international coffee and coffeehouse chain based in Seattle, Washington. Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse company in the world, with 17,009 stores in 55 countries, including over 11,000 in the United States, over 1,000 in Canada, over 700 in the United Kingdom, and...
and a sushi
Sushi
is a Japanese food consisting of cooked vinegared rice combined with other ingredients . Neta and forms of sushi presentation vary, but the ingredient which all sushi have in common is shari...
bar. Leisure facilities include an Odeon
Odeon Cinemas
Odeon Cinemas is a British chain of cinemas, one of the largest in Europe. It is owned by Odeon & UCI Cinemas Group whose ultimate parent is Terra Firma Capital Partners.-History:Odeon Cinemas was created in 1928 by Oscar Deutsch...
cinema and bowling alley
Ten-pin bowling
Ten-pin bowling is a competitive sport in which a player rolls a bowling ball down a wooden or synthetic lane with the objective of scoring points by knocking down as many pins as possible.-Summary:The lane is bordered along its length by semicylindrical channels Ten-pin bowling (commonly just...
. 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. 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.
Other occupants
Within the current Whiteleys building there is a TV studioTelevision studio
A television studio is an installation in which a video productions take place, either for the recording of live television to video tape, or for the acquisition of raw footage for post-production. The design of a studio is similar to, and derived from, movie studios, with a few amendments for the...
, which has been used for British breakfast TV
Breakfast television
Breakfast television or morning show , is a type of infotainment television program, broadcast live in the morning...
show RI:SE
RI:SE
RI:SE was a breakfast television show made by Princess Productions in collaboration with BSkyB for Channel 4 in the UK. It was scheduled to replace The Big Breakfast after declining ratings. It launched on 29 April 2002...
, currently producing The Wright Stuff
The Wright Stuff
The Wright Stuff is a British television chat show, hosted by Matthew Wright, and currently airing on Channel 5 each weekday morning from 9:15 to 11:10am....
, Something for the Weekend
Something for the Weekend (2000s BBC TV series)
Something for the Weekend is a British television series, broadcast on BBC Two on Sunday mornings. It features cookery, drinks, interviews with celebrity guests and clips from the week's television, as well as classic clips in the 'Deja View' section...
and T4
T4
- In airports and airlines :* The IATA airline code for Hellas Jet* Madrid Barajas Airport Terminal 4* London Heathrow Airport Terminal 4- In biology and medicine :* T4 phage, a bacteriophage* Thyroxine , a form of thyroid hormones* The T4 spinal nerve...
. All shows are produced by Princess Productions
Princess Productions
Princess Productions is a London-based television production company started in September 1996 by Henrietta Conrad and Sebastian Scott which has produced broadcast shows and pilots for all the major British broadcasters across a variety of genres, mainly specialising in entertainment and factual...
.
Former occupants
Until April 2010 Whiteleys also housed the online retailer NET-A-PORTER.COM. The company's main offices are now situated in Westfield LondonWestfield London
Westfield London is a shopping centre in White City in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. The centre was developed by the Westfield Group at a cost of £1.6bn,...
In popular culture
Whiteleys is mentioned in several books and has appeared in numerous films, TV shows; most notably:In War of the Wenuses
E. V. Lucas
Edward Verrall Lucas was a versatile and popular English writer. His nearly 100 books demonstrate great facility with style, and are generally acknowledged as humorous by contemporary readers and critics. Some of his essays about the sport cricket are still considered among the best instructional...
, an 1898 parody of The War of the Worlds
The War of the Worlds
The War of the Worlds is an 1898 science fiction novel written by H. G. Wells.The War of the Worlds may also refer to:- Radio broadcasts :* The War of the Worlds , the 1938 radio broadcast by Orson Welles...
, 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
Billion Dollar Brain
Billion Dollar Brain is a 1967 British espionage film directed by Ken Russell and based on the novel Billion-Dollar Brain by Len Deighton. The film features Michael Caine as secret agent Harry Palmer, the anti-hero protagonist of the film versions of The IPCRESS File and Funeral in Berlin...
the hero uses an X-Ray machine in Whiteleys' shoe department to examine the contents of a sealed package.
In the TV series adaption of The Tripods
The Tripods
The Tripods is a series of young adult novels written by John Christopher, beginning in 1967. The first two were the basis of a science fiction TV-series, produced in the United Kingdom in the 1980s....
, filmed in 1983, the run-down Whiteleys building is used to portray an abandoned department store in 21. Century Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
.
In the film Closer
Closer (film)
Closer is a 2004 romantic drama film written by Patrick Marber, based on his award-winning 1997 play of the same name. It was produced and directed by Mike Nichols and stars Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Clive Owen...
starring Julia Roberts
Julia Roberts
Julia Fiona Roberts is an American actress. She became a Hollywood star after headlining the romantic comedy Pretty Woman , which grossed $464 million worldwide...
, Jude Law
Jude Law
David Jude Heyworth Law , known professionally as Jude Law, is an English actor, film producer and director.He began acting with the National Youth Music Theatre in 1987, and had his first television role in 1989...
, Natalie Portman
Natalie Portman
Natalie Hershlag , better known by her stage name Natalie Portman, is an actress with dual American and Israeli citizenship. Her first role was as an orphan taken in by a hitman in the 1994 French action film Léon, but major success came when she was cast as Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequel...
and Clive Owen
Clive Owen
Clive Owen is an English actor, who has worked on television, stage and film. He first gained recognition in the United Kingdom for portraying the lead in the ITV series Chancer from 1990 to 1991...
. 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.
Whiteley’s Folly by Linda Stratmann (2004, Sutton Publishing) is a biography of William Whiteley, and a history of the store.