By the mid-twentieth century, Bourne and Hollingsworth had established itself within the web of department stores and other retailer and services that made up this part of London. Certainly, it was never in the league of near neighbours Selfridges and Liberty in terms of prestige or fashionability, but was considered by stalwart department store John Lewis as its closest competition. It was stores such as these provided the mainstays of many shopping trips within London’s most prestigious fashionable shopping cultures, alongside the little shops of Bond Street, out on the pages of British fashion magazines, a map in which this kind of subtle distinction was important. British Vogue’s exclusive shop-ping columnist generally skipped over Bourne and Hollingsworth fashion departments, but would include ephemeral items from time to time in its monthly round up of desirable goods. For example the 1940 Christmas column listed the store’s ‘Andy dog towel’ and ‘coloured swabs of cotton wool in celluloid canister’. In 1952, Shophound recommended ‘really lovely sprays of natural-looking flowers made of feathers’ available in the newly-opened boutique. These were perhaps small mentions, but they indicated that this kind of shop, and this part of Oxford Street, could be included in the well-heeled shopping trail.
To suggest that Bourne and Hollingsworth was not exactly at the cutting edge of fasionable consumption is not to diminish its role within West End shopping networks. Indeed, a core of well-regarded West End Business – john Lewis, D.H.Evans, Dickins and Jones and Fenwicks amongst others – traded on a similar culture of quiet, dignified conservatism, which was not seen to be at odds with the newness of the store architecture or commodities. As Vogue recognised, familiarity and reliability were valued in the department store scene, ‘There is something reassuring in the proximity of every comfort for body and soul’.
The architectures and interior spaces of Bourne and Hollingsworth were built around these respectable practices and were infused with these cultures of quite conservatism. Stafford Borne was mindful that the new building for the shop built in the 1920s represented an enormous expense and would need to see the store through many decades, He chose with caution, avoiding fashionable modern retail architect, and commissioning the architectural practice of John Slater. Tellingly, the Slaters were close family friends and neighbours, with offices practically next door at 46 Berners Street. The firm had built its reliable reputation as architects and surveyors to the Berners Estate, on whose land Bourne and Hollingsworth was situated. John Slater’s own son and partner J. Alan slater acknowledge the conservatism of the firm’s early twentieth-century work, ‘I am bound to say, to modern eyes, these buildings were not particularly distinguished from the architectural point of view, but were all well planned, efficiently built and proved to be profitable to the developer.’ Bourne had already tested out these architects with structural alterations to the old shop, a nearby factory and garage, hostel facillites for staff, and alterations to the Bourne family home, Garston Manor in Hertfordshire.