Opening a food hall at its Oxford Street store was a gamble for John Lewis but the move paid off. Now Bluewater is due to have a version installed that will move the format on. John Ryan reports

It’s roughly 16 months since John Lewis unveiled a food hall filled with Waitrose goodies in its Oxford Street flagship. At the time, questions were asked as to whether it was really needed when Waitrose had just opened an upscale version of its standard supermarket format on nearby Marylebone High Street.

“It’s strange really. At the time we thought we were taking a risk by putting a food hall into a John Lewis, but it’s been incredibly successful,” says John Lewis head of retail design Kim Morris.

And to judge, for instance, by the enthusiasm of the ladies who look after the cheese room – a separate area within the food hall in which more than 200 fermented milk products are on offer – this achievement is not entirely surprising.

So much so that John Lewis is midway through investing£22m in its Bluewater outpost, the department store chain’s second largest branch after Oxford Street, of which a major part is being directed towards the creation of another food hall. John Lewis Bluewater celebrates its 10th birthday next month and is therefore probably in need of reassessment and perhaps a bit of a brush-up. The scale of the makeover that it is receiving, however, dwarfs anything else presently happening at the Kent mega mall.

And according to Morris, the decision to punch a hole through the part of the ground floor where the escalators are located was always going to happen, it’s just been a matter of deciding what to put in the basement. This is where the 16,500 sq ft (1,530 sq m) food hall, due to open in August, will be located. It will have a lot in common with Oxford Street, where foodies ride the down escalator from street level to get to the shop-in-shop. In creating the space, John Lewis has kept faith with Italian design and build outfit Schweitzer, which supplied fixtures and fittings for the Waitrose store on Marylebone High Street, as well as the Oxford Street emporium’s food hall.

But this store will be different from Oxford Street. Morris says that following consumer research the feedback from shoppers was that food hall customers are different from supermarket shoppers: they need time to consider and browse. All of which means that catering and snack-style dining is a good idea, if only to vary the pace for those visiting this part of the store. With this research in mind, a 20-seater wine bar was put into the Oxford Street store two weeks ago. According to John Lewis branch manager of the food hall Mark Wiley it sold 250 glasses of wine in its first week, with sales for the bar as a whole reaching£11,000. Not bad from just 20 seats, although it is doubtful that many will have chosen to quaff a glass of the top of the range£500 bottle while taking in the view. It also indicates either a healthy throughput of shoppers wishing to take the weight off their feet, or some extremely bibulous individuals.

In Bluewater, the principle will be writ large. Instead of a few tables with designer-esque chairs, there will be a series of counters and bar-like structures with seats placed around them, creating more of a deli feel than devotees of the Oxford Street food hall will be familiar with.

Revolutionary road

There is another difference about Bluewater, which is likely to make it far more of a test bed for future stores than its central London precursor: this store is out of town. Bluewater may have many high street names, but unlike a high street, getting there almost invariably involves a journey made, for all but the most persevering, by car.

Morris points out that Oxford Street shoppers are “time-pressed”, with little slack for anything other than a hurried inspection in which grab and go is the overriding priority. This means that the chances of a leisurely food shop are slight and the sight of shoppers pushing trolleys is certainly going to be unusual.

In Bluewater, by contrast, shoppers are more at leisure, have made a day out of their visit to the mall and consequently, larger basket sizes are likely to be more common. The food hall is therefore somewhere aimed as much at main food shoppers as upscale convenience customers.

There is also the fact that in spite of its very considerable size, Bluewater shoppers are not exactly spoilt for choice when it comes to buying food. When it opens, the John Lewis food hall will join Marks & Spencer as the only substantial food retailer in the centre – meaning that not only will M&S finally have a run for its money, but also that there will be more reasons for visiting Bluewater.

It’s worth noting that while the food hall is the major structural undertaking at the store, by the autumn other changes will also be apparent. Foremost among these will be the reconfiguration of the womenswear department. “Some of our loyal home customers don’t necessarily shop with us for fashion,” Morris admits. “The womenswear project is about addressing this.”

The in-house design team at John Lewis has been working on this part of the Bluewater makeover with Dalziel + Pow since January last year. Morris says that in terms of department zoning and clarifying the different elements of the offer, the store was “doing a pretty poor job”. She says that when completed, the new-look womenswear area at Bluewater will have greater definition and, in a “revolutionary” break with tradition, walkways will be largely eliminated from the area. In their place will be four sub-departments, Denim, Classic, Contemporary and Designer, with the latter affording diffusion brands greater prominence.

And less than a month after Bluewater is complete, John Lewis’s other major project this year, a store in Cardiff, will open its doors for the first time. The Cardiff branch will feature the new womenswear look as well, although there will be no food hall.

Morris comments that while the Oxford Street food hall has been a success, it is Bluewater that will determine whether or not future stores benefit from something similar. It’s perhaps worth mentioning that Morris and her team took a stroll around M&S last week and were spotted by the branch manager, who was keen to hear details of the forthcoming food hall. Clearly M&S is as keenly aware of the transformation that is under way at its rival as every other retailer in the mall. The outcome must be positive for John Lewis, but equally for Bluewater as a whole.