Selfridges, Oxford Street is a Grade II listed retail premises, located in Oxford Street, London, England. It was designed by Daniel Burnham for Harry Gordon Selfridge, and opened in 1909. Still the headquarters of Selfridge & Co. department stores, with 540,000 square feet (50,000 m2) of selling space, the store is the second largest retail premises in the UK, half as big as the biggest department store in Europe, Harrods. It was named the world's best department store in 2010, and again in 2012.
In 1906, Harry Gordon Selfridge travelled to England on holiday with his wife, Rose. Unimpressed with the quality of existing British retaillers, he noticed that the large stores in London had not adopted the latest selling ideas that were being used in the United States. Selfridge decided to invest £400,000 in building his own department store in what was then the unfashionable western end of Oxford Street, by slowly buying up a series of Georgian architecture buildings which were on the desired block defined by the surrounding four streets: Somerset, Wigmore, Orchard and Duke.
The building was designed by American architect Daniel Burnham, who also crafted Marshall Field's main store in his home town of Chicago, and the Flatiron Building in New York. The building was an early example in the UK of the use of a steel frame, five stories high with three basement levels and a roof terrace, originally laid out to accommodate 100 departments.
American-trained Swedish structural engineer Sven Bylander was engaged to design the steel frame structure. As the building was one of the early examples of steel frame in the UK, Bylander had to first agree appropriate building regulations with the London County Council, requiring amendments to the London Building Act 1844. Using as a basis the regulations which covered the similarly-designed London docklands warehouses, Bylander then agreed changes which enabled greater spans within lesser beam dimensions due to the use of steel over stone. Bylander designed the entire supporting structure which was approved by the LCC in 1907, with a steel frame based on blue brick pile foundations, supporting a steel frame which holds all of the internal walls and the concrete floors. Bylander designed in additional supported internal walls, as LCC would not approve store areas above 450,000 cubic foot (13,000 m3) due to the then approved fire safety regulations, many of which were removed 20 years later in light of new legislation. Bylander submitted a 13 page fully illustrated account of the design of the building to Concrete and Constructional Engineering, which was published in 1909. The work of Burnham and Bylander with LCC led to the passing of the LCC (General Powers) Act 1909, also called the Steel Frame Act, which gave the council the power to regulate the construction of reinforced concrete structures.
American architect Francis Swales, who trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was briefed to design the frontispiece. Aided by British architects R. Frank Atkinson and Thomas Smith Tait, the final design was highly influenced by John Burnet's 1904 extension to the British Museum. The steel supporting columns are hidden behind Ionic columns, to create a facade which present a visually uniform, classical, Beaux-Arts appearance. The distinctive polychrome sculpture above the Oxford Street entrance is the work of British sculptor Gilbert Bayes. The final frontage, through use of cast iron window frames to a maximum size of 19 feet 4 inches (5.89 m) by 12 feet 0 inches (3.66 m), means that both the Oxford Street and Duke Street frontages are made up of more glass than stone or iron works.
Opened on 15 March 1909, the store was built in phases. The first phase consisted of the nine-and-a-half bays closest to the Duke Street corner, a site of 250 feet (76 m) wide on Oxford Street by 175 feet (53 m) along Duke Street. The floor heights averaged 15 feet (4.6 m), and the initial structure contained nine passenger lifts, two service lifts and six staircases.
The main entrance and all of the bays to its left were added some 18 years after the store first opened, using a modified construction system. The complete building opened fully in 1928, and resultantly through the use of supporting spandrel steel panels, the scale of the glass panes within the main entrance could be greatly enlarged.
A scheme to erect a massive tower above the store post-World War I was never carried out. Harry Selfridge also proposed a subway link to Bond Street station, and renaming it "Selfridges"; however, contemporary opposition quashed the idea.
The final design of the building completed in 1928, although classical in visible style and frontage, is thoroughly modern in its steel frame construction. In part due to new schools of architectural thought emerging apart from the classical schools, and in part due to the close proximity of World War I, the building is seen as the last of the great classical buildings undertaken within the UK. Although the UK was late in adopting modern architecture only from the 1930s onwards, by the mid-20th century many architects looked at Selfridges as if it were pre-historic in design, accepted just because Harry Gordon Selfridge wanted to advetise his business with a confident display of classicism in stone.
There are two levels of basement beneath the lower-ground shop floor: the ‘sub’ and the ‘sub-sub’. Combined, these descend 60 metres (200 ft) below street level. These two areas are then split into two more areas: the dry sub and sub-sub, and their "wet" equivalents. The wet area is beneath the original nine-and-a-half bays closest to the Duke Street corner of the 1909 building. The "dry" is under the rear of the building, known as the SWOD after the surrounding four streets - Somerset, Wigmore, Orchard and Duke – that once enclosed it. During World War II after the entry of the United States into the conflict, from 1942 the dry sub-sub SWOD was used by the United States Army. The building had one of the only secure telex lines, was safe from bombing, and was close to the US Embassy on Grosvenor Square. Initially used by General Eisenhower, the commander of SHAEF, it later housed 50 soldiers from the 805th Signal Service Company of the US Army Signal Corps, who installed a SIGSALY code-scrambling device connected to a similar terminal in the Pentagon building. The first conference took place on the 15 July 1943. Initial visitors included Prime Minister Winston Churchill, to enable secure communications with the President of the United States, although later extensions were installed to both 10 Downing Street and the Cabinet War Rooms. Rumours persist of a tunnel built from Selfridges to the embassy so that personnel could move between the two in safety, with interrogation cells for prisoners hewn from the resultant uneven space available.
While restoration work was carried in 2002, the scaffold surround was used to carry the largest photographic artwork ever produced, 60 feet (18 m) tall by 900 feet (270 m) long and weighing two tons. Created by Sam Taylor-Wood, it showed a gathering of well-known pop and cultural figures of the time, including Sir Elton John.