The past 25 years brought constant innovation of stores. John Ryan looks at some of the most groundbreaking formats during the period.

Many stores have come and gone over the past two-and-a-half decades. Some are remembered through a nostalgic haze, others are still here and a few flickered briefly before the flame of novelty was extinguished.

Yet look closely and it is not too hard to discern some of the seminal stores that have shaped the high street and shopping centres.

The best have got better and many of the stores that have been chosen have changed over time, keeping pace with the broader changes that have taken place during the past 25 years.

And for the purposes of showing what might have been, we’ve included a couple that ‘got away’ and would perhaps have thrived in a different place and time.

Apple

Regent Street (2004)

Apple,Regent Street

Apple,Regent Street

When Apple opened its first UK store in November 2004, it was the US technology company’s first foray into Europe and was almost immediately recognised as a destination for geeky worshippers wishing to pay homage at the shrine of technology and sleek product design.

Close to a decade after it opened, it remains the most popular store on Regent Street and is thought to have the highest sales per square foot in London’s West End.

Noteworthy elements that have subsequently become signifiers of an Apple store are the Genius Bar, the wooden tables and, in the middle of things, a glass and steel staircase.

Tesco

Extra Pitsea (1997)

Tesco Extra, Pitsea

Tesco Extra, Pitsea

The biggest of Tesco’s store formats first saw the light of day in 1997 when the UK’s leading grocer unveiled Extra in the estuarial Essex town of Pitsea.

This is an enormous shop and it allowed Tesco to install a large quantity of general merchandise into the store mix - something that was followed by other food retailers and intensified competition across the whole retail industry.

This particular store has in fact been remodelled substantially since opening and now boasts an F&F shop-in-shop of the kind that is being slowly rolled out across the rest of the Extra portfolio.

Niketown

Oxford Circus (1999)

Niketown, Oxford Circus

Niketown, Oxford Circus

In spite of it being more than a decade since Nike opened the Niketown store at Oxford Circus, this remains the brand’s largest retail presence on the planet.

While the multi-floor sporting theme park has certainly been about shifting Nike merchandise, it is rather more of an encounter point for fans of the brand.

It has changed substantially since opening with the inclusion of a glass cube, the NIKEiD Studio on one of the store’s upper levels, where boots and training shoes can be personalised, and large numbers of interactive elements are spread across the store.

This is without doubt the most impressive sports store in London and probably the UK, and has been since it opened.

Selfridges

Oxford Street

Selfridges

For close to half of the past 25 years Selfridges was an elderly dowager on Oxford Street. At the end of the 1990s, however, under the leadership of Italian chief executive Vittorio Radice, the 540,000 sq ft department store was transformed as its interior was opened up and reinvented.

Today it is the place where shoppers visiting London go to look at new fashion and has been voted the world’s best department store by the Intercontinental Group of Department Stores for the past two years running.

It is also seen as the most contemporary of London’s department stores although Harrods, Harvey Nichols and Liberty could also lay claim to this accolade to some degree.

Primark

Marble Arch (2007)

Primark, Marble Arch

Primark, Marble Arch

The large store at Oxford Street’s western extremity has changed hands twice since C&A gave up the UK ghost in 2000.

Initially it became the central London flagship for department store Allders and was then snapped up by fashion discounter Primark, which moved in during 2007.

Today it trades from 70,000 sq ft across two floors, ground and first, and epitomises the best of value fashion with lines of checkouts and staff whose job is principally about replenishment rather than active selling.

It has changed little since opening, but large-format video screens have become part of the in-store vista as the retailer moves into the digital world. Its recent collaboration with Asos is part of this.

Topshop/Topman

Oxford Circus

Topshop, Oxford Circus

Topshop, Oxford Circus

Sometimes referred to as ‘Fashion Central’, the Topshop/Topman flagship is a modish landmark trading across multiple levels and sets the tone for the fascia’s many stores elsewhere in the capital and beyond.
Claimed to be the largest fashion store in the world, like so many other large-footprint stores it has changed substantially over the years and continues to do so. Today, Topshop shoppers can benefit from a nail bar, a hairdressing salon and an Eat cafe, among other things.
Topman customers access the floors dedicated to them via a long escalator and the two different
parts of the shops are almost totally discrete in consequence.

Sainsbury’s

‘Millennium’ store (1999)

Sainsbury's, Millennium store

Sainsbury’s, Millennium store

When it opened in 1999, this store was at the cutting edge of what was to become a trend in retail store design in terms of both sustaina­bility and promoting the retailer’s eco-credentials.

With wind turbines out front and a partly turfed roof, it ticked many of the boxes that were to become fairly commonplace a few years down the line.

In addition to its eco-credentials, the store was a thing of rare beauty, capturing the eyes of locals and drivers charging in from nearby Kent. Indeed, it was actually nearly as glamorous, for a supermarket, as the somewhat ill-fated Dome.

So radical was the store design that it was in fact nominated for a Stirling Prize in 2000 and took the RIBA award for sustainability in the same year. Times have moved on since it opened and the store is now poised to close as Sainsbury’s moves to larger premises. But it remains one of the seminal pieces of big store design in the UK during the past quarter century.

Whole Foods Market

Kensington (2008)

Whole Foods Market

Whole Foods Market

Seen by some observers as something of a problem child for the upscale US-based food retailer, owing to its multi-floor layout, the Whole Foods Market on Kensington High Street is nonetheless significant for the way in which it raised merchandising standards among the UK’s grocers.

When it opened this 80,000 sq ft, three-floor emporium, the former Barkers department store, was pounced on as an example of how market-style merchandising could be made to work to good effect in a store.

Since then, the influence of the way in which layout and merchandising are carried out in this shop can be seen in stores as diverse as the Waitrose food hall in John Lewis on Oxford Street and almost any recently refurbished Tesco.

M&S

Simply Food (2001)

Marks and Spencer, Simply Food

Marks and Spencer, Simply Food

M&S garnered plaudits for its Simply Food format, which straddles the divide between deli and supermarket.

The stores, offering prepared food and selected meal ingredients, are to be found from airports to motorway service stations by way of high streets and malls and have proved a hit with shoppers. The first shops to open under the format were in Twickenham and Surbiton in 2001, since when more than 400 have welcomed shoppers.

This is an M&S format that has been around for more than a decade but that still feels fresh and inviting.

Currys

Megastore (2008)

Currys, Megastore

Currys, Megastore

Scale has proved central to the recovery and growth of electricals retailer Dixons and to its sector-leading position - and, of course, to seeing off the threat of Best Buy.

The Currys Megastore format was unveiled in a store just off junction 9 of the M6 (close to Birmingham) in 2008 and its 60,000 sq ft big-box presence proved decisive in making the retailer the default consumer choice for electrical goods. At the end of 2008 a joint format, comprising PC World and Currys, was tested and subsequent megastores have mostly followed this model.

As is the case with the majority of the Megastores, an out-of-town or edge-of-town location has been a key factor in rolling out the format.

B&Q

Warehouse (1995)

B and Q Warehouse

B and Q Warehouse

B&Q’s Warehouse format made its debut in Aberdeen in 1995, after a period of evolution from the Depot that preceded it. This was about bigger being better, and by 2003 the 100th B&Q Warehouse opened, in Northern Ireland.
Capacious aisles, a shed structure and a near-comprehensive DIY offer are what has characterised Warehouse and helped B&Q retain its sector-leading position.

During 2013, the DIY sector has come under pressure, but this large format has remained the standard by which other rivals tend to be judged.

The Warehouse name, however, was dropped in the middle of the last decade and replaced simply with B&Q.

Carphone Warehouse

(1989)

Carphone Warehouse

Carphone Warehouse

A format that has made founder Sir Charles Dunstone fortunes, Carphone first appeared on Marylebone High Street in 1989. The store was a house of mobile brands rather than a branded house, and the proposition was impartial advice on which handset to buy, based on user needs rather than brand preference.

In essence, the stores look quite similar to other mobile phone retailers, in terms of handsets displayed on perimeter modules, but it is the service model that marked it out as a format that was destined to be successful. The Marylebone High Street store was most recently renovated in 2011.

Tesco Express

(1994)

Tesco Express

Tesco Express

As the only retailer to have two entries in this selection, Tesco proves it has the popular touch at both ends of the retail size spectrum.

Tesco Express is its convenience format. The first half-pint-sized store opened on a garage forecourt in southwest London in 1994.

Since then, the format, with a highly targeted and localised offer, has become a mainstay of UK high streets and has been in the vanguard of self-scan. It epitomises the model for ‘get in, get it, get out’ food shopping and remains on of Tesco’s strongest formats.

…And two that got away

M&S

Lifestore, Gateshead (2004)

Marks and Spencer Lifestore

When it opened, the M&S Lifestore, a minimalist shed on the fringes of Gateshead’s Metro Centre, was seen as a bold move into selling homewares to design-conscious shoppers.

Designed by architect John Pawson, Lifestore featured a house-within-a-house and a rectangular concrete bath. This was a severe, almost monastic view of domestic interiors and ultimately Gateshead shoppers did not reach for their debit and credit cards.

Before the second Lifestore opened, on one of the retail parks that surround the Lakeside shopping centre, the project was canned.

The site was subsequently bagged by Danish homewares retailer Ilva, which also failed to capture the popular imagination.

It is hard not to wonder, however, whether the Lifestore idea might have worked in different circumstances.

Ilva

Gateshead (2008)

Ilva

Ilva

Following the Lifestore debacle, a Danish homewares format was brought to the UK by former B&Q chief executive Martin Toogood and the Lifestore sites in Gateshead and Thurrock were acquired and opened as Ilva. A store in Manchester followed and, overall, the use of Chinese basalt and large amounts of glazing on the store frontages, as well as a distinctly minimalist interior, led to a mid-market offer housed in an upscale environment.

It looked good and shoppers inspected the interior but, as with Lifestore, it failed to find favour with shoppers and the stores all closed during the financial crisis in 2008.

As with Lifestore, perhaps with a more modest fit-out but a retention of the brand’s overall look and feel, this might also have been one that could have survived.