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.