Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (48 page)

5. Selfridge dreamed of building a double-island site, extending from Oxford Street, flanked by Orchard and Duke Streets and stretching back to Wigmore Street. The architects, Sir John Burnet and Frank Atkinson, executed a series of ideas incorporating a dome, intended to be ‘as important as that of St Paul’s’.

6. One of the series of spectacular advertisements to launch Selfridge’s, drawn by leading illustrators and artists of the day such as Byam Shaw (this drawing by Sir Bernard Partridge), which formed the biggest retail advertising campaign ever seen in England at that time.

7. Horse-drawn buses were a familiar site on London’s streets until the end of 1911, when the London General Omnibus Company replaced the service with motor buses. Selfridge’s name could be seen everywhere – except on the front of the store.

8. Advertising copy often focused on family values – as well as good value – and promoted the concept of ‘having a family day out at Selfridge’s’. This image was part of a colour series created for popular women’s magazines.

9. Harry Selfridge on the roof terrace of the store in 1911, with (
left
) the fashionable playwright Harley Granville-Barker and (
right
) the fashionably dressed author Arnold Bennett.

10. The store’s famous roof terrace was always a focus of major entertainment including dance demonstrations and exhibitions. Closed during the First World War, the roof gardens re-opened with a series of afternoon fashion shows.

11. The light and bright store interiors, with high ceilings, spacious aisles and wide vistas, were unlike anything ever seen before in London. If Selfridge found dust on one of the glass counters, he scrawled his initials – HGS – on the surface. They wouldn’t be there for long.

12. Selfridge’s created the concept of visual display as we know it today. Their window-dressing, under the direction of the American display manager Edward Goldsman, was raised to a pinnacle of perfection.

13. Harry and his daughter Rosalie, photographed at Chicago’s Grand Passenger Station in 1911. The family travelled back once, and often twice, a year to Chicago, where their arrival was always a local news item.

14. The First World War gave women the opportunity to take over jobs previously always undertaken by men. At Selfridge’s, they cleaned windows, trained as firefighters, stoked the boilers and drove the delivery vans. Here, one of the smart bottle-green and gold-lettered delivery vans is dressed for a staff member’s wedding – decorated with flowers to deliver the bride!

15. The French
chanteuse
Gaby Deslys, described by Arnold Bennett as ‘the official
amant
’ of Harry Selfridge in 1915, and as famous for her hats as for her singing and dancing.

16. From exhibiting aeroplanes such as Louis Blériot’s to the Sopwith
Atlantic,
Selfridge’s promoted aviation at every possible opportunity. In 1919, the year Harry Selfridge made the world’s first commercial air flight travelling from London to Dublin, he also staged a fashion show of leather flying suits on the Observation Tower on the store’s roof.