|
|
|
|
|
|
WHITELEYS
Whiteleys was Britain's first department store located in the Bayswater area of London (UK), with its main entrance on Queensway. It is now a shopping centre.
The original Whiteleys department store was created by William Whiteley, who started a drapery store at 31 Westbourne Grove in 1863. By 1867 it had expanded to a row of stores, containing 17 departments. By 1890 over 6,000 staff were employed in the business, most of them living in company-owned male and female dormitories, having to obey 176 rules and working 7am to 11pm, six days a week. Whiteley also bought massive farmlands and erected food-processing factories to provide produce for the store and for staff catering.
The first store, described as 'an immense symposium of the arts and industries of the nation and of the world', was devastated in an enormous fire in 1897, one of the largest fires in London's history.
The current building was designed by John Belcher and J. Joass, and was opened by the Lord Mayor of London in 1911. It was the height of luxury at the time, including both a theatre and a golf-course on the roof. It appears in a number of early 20th-century novels.
The department store closed down in 1981 and the building was purchased by a firm called the Whiteleys Partnership, which later sold it to the Standard Life Assurance Company.
In 1989 Whiteleys was re-opened as a shopping centre.
Trivia
- Within the current Whiteleys building there is a TV studio, which has been used for short-lived British breakfast TV show RI:SE and The Wright Stuff.
- In Pygmalion, Eliza Dolittle is sent "to Whiteleys to be attired".
- It is claimed that Adolf Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe not to bomb Whiteleys as he wanted it as his headquarters once he had invaded Britain.[citation needed]
The current shopping centre contains a large number of shops and places to eat including Starbucks, Books etc, an Easyeverything Internet cafe, a sushi bar and Odeon Cinema.
External links
 This article about a retailer in the United Kingdom is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|