I had passed this building many times before, often glimpsed from the top deck of the 453 bus, without registering the faded ghost signage revealing its previous tenant – Burberry’s.
On closer inspection, I noticed additional remnants of this history: a letter ‘B’ stamped on the down-pipes and carved atop pilasters; an original stone side-entrance carved ‘BURBERRYS TRADE ENTRANCE’.
The creator of this grand architectural statement, the designer-cum-cricketer Walter Cave (1863-1939), is commemorated in a discrete carving on the base of one of the central columns.
Thomas Burberry opened his first shop in Basingstoke at the age of 21, guided by the simple principle that clothing should be designed to protect people from the British weather. The business expanded throughout the late 19 and early 20th century, before Burberry opened this flagship store in 1912.
The façade is made up of a compact pattern of Ionic and Tuscan columns supporting giant arches, with neat dormer windows at roof level. In the Buildings of England entry, Pevsner suggests the double height recessed steel-framed windows, which sit behind the arches, are a nod to the new Selfridges building opened in 1909 on nearby Oxford Street. The Debenhams and Freebody store on Wigmore Street, completed a few years earlier in 1907, incorporates a similar set of arches, albeit on larger more baroque scale.
Burberry’s Haymarket store was built at a time when London had well and truly emerged as a global centre. Capital was sloshing around this Imperial city – ‘the clearing house of the world’ in Joseph Chamberlain’s words. And a distinctive force, that of conspicuous consumption and retail-as-leisure was asserting itself. The extravagant buildings left behind by Burberry, Whiteley, Selfridge etc. are testament to this new experience economy.
Streetscapes 