Important southern section of the island fronting Oxford Street. The remaining pieces of the ‘island’, 8, 9 and 10 Wells Street, were not secured until the 1950s. This was not about property dealing as an end in itself, rather about consolidation, securing the space and the frontage to enable Bourne and Hollingsworth to be an effective department store. Similar expansion and rebuilding policies were central to many department store was to secure control of a complete ‘island site’ like this one, then rebuild it in a coherent, more fashionable style, with long stretches of plate glass display windows and connections with pavement traffic on all four sides. During these decades of wrangling of control of the site and building up business, Bourne and Hollingsworth’s owners did not buy the freehold. This was before the huge inflation of property prices, so it was not considered worth it, yet by assembling a much more strategically important site it was not surprising that as soon as the climate changed, others would seek to do so.
By the 1960s the value of store as a going business often became incidental to its asset value as a property; the department store itself became a commodity. Rising property values made it tempting for retailers to cash in or redevelop sites, particularly in times of tough trading conditions. In a climate of increasingly rapacious acquisition of both business and property, the distinction between store owners and property speculators could became so fine as to be virtually invisible, as in the case of entrepreneurs like charlrs Clore and Hugh Fraser whose activities frequently made headline news in the pass. With retail operating in a world in which the property market was becoming increasingly dominant, Christopher Bourne commented later, ‘The value of the site could be divorced from the business and the latter transferred to a cheaper rental. Much of the expansion. In London modernization and rebuilding of the 1960s and ‘70s was financed by sale and leaseback arrangements which consisted of selling freeholds to financial institutions and then leasing them back in other to free up capital.
Mid-market, traditional department store seemed particularly vulnerable to this strategy. The Army Stores in Victoria, was founded in 1871 as a co-operative for military officers, but from 1928 operated as a commercial department store, one of Bourne and Hollingsworth’s competitors for the middle-class market. The property was acquired for large scale redevelopment by the Scottish retailer and property speculator, Hugh Fraser in 1973, when the three existing freeholders, Army and Navy Stores, Church Commissioners and Crown Estate, were involved in a 44.5m sale and leaseback scheme. The redevelopment included a 137,000 square feet department store pre-let to the Army and Navy Stores. But also a much larger office development along Victoria Street. Fraser notorious for his successful invasion of retailing south of the Border, also and leased back the freeholds of Brakers in Kensington D.H. Evans Street, and many of the other stores he hand acquired. Another store group, Debenhams, had accumulated some 65 million worth of property by 1972. It sold and leased back the freehold of the former Marshall and Snelgrove store on Oxford Street, and sold the innovative Woollands Store in Knightsbridge outright for redevelopment as a hotel even though it was trading successfully. The hotel was bought by Maxwell Joseph’s Grand Metropolitan Hotels Group for Capital and Counties Property Group who owned the site. The architect involved was Richard Seifert who subsequently became a pivotal in the games around Bourne and Hollingsworth.
The sale and leaseback strategy had been pioneered in the late 1950s by Charles Clore who applied it to millions of pounds worth of property, then used the proceeds to buy up large promotion of British shoe stores and the shoe manufacturing industry. In 1965 he bought the freehold of Selfridges for 62m from the Portman Family Estate and the Lewis Investment Trush, which owned Selfridges. Leonard Sainer, Chairman of his Sears Holdings company, had various strategies for obtaining desired properties, such as buying adjacent property and becoming tenant as a first step to buying it at a favourable price. Yet Sainer himself sommented that the sale and leaseback strategy was ‘shortsighted … you cannot be a master of your own destiny.’ In the case of Bourne and Hollingsworth, it was not the family owners who capitalised on their store’s site value, since they remained leaseholders in the heated climate of the 1970s.
In an increasingly predatory atmosphere, and amid considerable press speculation, Christoper Bourne was frequently approached by developers and other retail groups for the Bourne and Hollingsworth leasehold, but wanted to sell the business as a going concern rather that for its plot value; his heart was in the family department store. Yet, recognizing the value of the Oxford Street site, Christopher Bourne made attempts to secure the freehold. He also employed architect Richard Seifert, for a fee of 5000, to conduct a feasibility study into the development possibilities of the Oxford Street site. This was very significant move: Richard Seifert, described as the ‘developer’s architect par excellence’, had been responsible for numerous high profile commercial building Centre Point on New Oxford Street of 1963-67, the notorious monument to postwar property speculation, Seifert was the most successful of a new breed of entrepreneurial architects, with a notable understanding of developers’ approach to urban capital, and expertise in negotiating planning laws, able to squeeze the maximum advantage out of a site. Mindful that he was already advising other big West End stores; Maples, Debenham & Freebody and Gemages, Christopher Bourne noted ‘We agreed that Seifert was the only architect whit Known and proven authority, whose opinion would have value – should approach him by phone’. What could have saved the store became a lost opportunity: Seifert’s new architectural and spatial envisioning of the store provided too much in the face of strong attachments to the existing building along with of capital to modern the store in any meaningful way, and Seifert became frustrated by the to take decisive action.
Meanwhile, Christopher Bourne had negotiated to by the store’s freehold from Berners Estate for half a million pound, but crucially failed to get family agreement. The company that bought the business in 1978 was make as enormous profit in less than 12 months by buying and reselling the freehold of the large island site while sacrificing the retail business. The key advantages of family – run business had been strong company identity and continuity; it was also the kind of business whose ‘benevolent paternalism’ still maintained the 750-room hostel in Bloomsbury for its employees, hardly an indication of short-termism. Yet Bourne and Hollingsworth also faced increasing internal problems typical of paternalistic family – run business: disparate and strong company identity and continuity: it was also the kind of business whose ‘benevolent pateralism’ still maintained the 750-room hostel in Bloomsbury for it employees, hardly an indication of short-termism.