This is not necessarily to suggest that weak architectural decisions were made at Bourne and Hollingsworth: it was after all very common to build commercial building in the neoclassical style at this time. Furthermore, it was a well-established retail strategy to use façade architecture to communicate store identify to consumer, and this un-showy and urbane architecture was supremely well-matched with the character of this paternalist family business. Yet this kind of building was the only option for this company: john Lewis, a West End department store business with a very similar customer base, considered by Bourne and Hollingsworth its closest competitor, was shortly to make very different architectural choices, stunning both architects and the general public with its strikingly modernist Peter Jones store in Chelsea. Some efforts were made at Bournes in the 1930s to catch up with new developments in retail building. A permanent continuous canopy was added above the display windows in 1935, the first to be allowed in London, shading window shoppers from rain and glare, and echoing the modernist stores of Europe and America. In 1939 escalators were fitted, in response particularly to the celebrated central escalator hall at the newly-opened D.H. Evans further west along Oxford Street. The architect John Slater later explained that ‘explained in store buildings had by this time become current practice and our clients were anxious to keep up whit the times. Other architectural developments were intended to prop up the store’s identify as a benevolent paternalist employer. The original pre-war staff hostel by Slater in the curve of store Street was supplemented by another in Gower Street by the same firm in 1912. Both were socially progressive for their time, Slater recalling of Gower Street, ‘it consisted of two and three bedded rooms on the fifth floors with sitting rooms and a large ballroom on the ground floor, and dining rooms, kitchens and centralised bathrooms in the basement. Grower Street was extended and modernised in the 1920s and 30s, with the addition of an impressive swimming pool in 1931. However, these were all effectively minor secondary projects, concerned not with architectural advertising but with the smooth functioning of the store. There was in comparison an inescapable permanence to the initial decision made in the stone and steel about the large Oxford Street store in the early 1920s. This architectural ordinariness that worked well for Bourne and Hollingsworth up to the vulnerability of the company when post-war developers roamed the West End.