John Lewis is a doughty symbol of London retail, but that does not guarantee it a bricks-and-mortar future. Gamages on Holborn traded in everything from toys to supplying the army with catapults during the First World War, but was an anachronism in swinging London by the Seventies, while Dickins & Jones was a pillar of Sloaney London until it expired in the Cool Britannia of 2007. House of Fraser shut down its London store last year.
When John Lewis opened its modernist palace in the Sixties, the winged figure statue which graces its Holles Street side was supplied by the great sculptor Barbara Hepworth — a symbol of elevation and urban excitement of the time.
