‘A recession is a terrible thing to waste,’ said Kevin Roche, a director at US store design company Callison, last week in what might, at first glance, appear to be a distinctly counter-intuitive moment.

However, he qualified his gnomic statement by saying that those who have managed to maintain robust balance sheets and kept costs under control will be well placed not just to ride out the recession (© G Brown 2008), but to benefit from it.


Which perhaps might explain what’s happening on Regent Street at the moment. By early 2007, there might have been some justification for thinking that the thoroughfare was on the verge of becoming an axis of Anglo-Spanish retail as names such as Hoss Intropia, Mango, Zara and Desigual all decided that the location was for them.


In today’s economic climate however, it looked for a while as if all the good things that have happened to Regent Street would come to nothing and vacant units might begin to appear as shoppers decided there are better (for which read cheaper) places to shop. Yet the only casualty appears to be Zavvi, and that is a corporate failure rather than any kind of Regent Street debacle.


Now the emphasis seems to be transatlantic. The arrival of Anthropologie later this year will mark yet another twist in the area’s evolution. Like its sister brand Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie stores tend to be one-offs with strong architectural elements and visual merchandising of the kind that most retailers can only dream of.


Anthropologie joins US cousins Apple, Banana Republic, Brooks Brothers and, of course, National Geographic on the street. The question now must be whether future stores will enjoy the level of investment that has been apparent as Regent Street has been developed to date.


It seems a pretty safe bet that you wouldn’t open a store in what is, debatably, London’s most glamorous shopping location unless a fair amount of cash were going to be splashed. It also seems probable that those opting to take space in the current market have considerably deeper pockets than the high street average – either that or the Crown Estate is making the whole exercise distinctly worthwhile for new arrivals.


All of which means that the appearance of premium shopping streets is likely to remain intact, even while elsewhere high streets tenants look on aghast as the men with wooden hoardings arrive to board up another unit. Roche’s opinion would seem to apply more to luxury locations and the outcome is likely to be pockets of real innovation in spite of everything that may be going on elsewhere.