‘Est 1884”. Thanks to assiduous reminders, it’s widely understood that the story of Marks & Spencer enjoys roughly the same place in national history and affections as do the Tudors and the second world war. In the absence of a Henry VIII or Churchill, the brand gets by with an innocent cartoon character/pink sweet, Percy Pig, whom customers are encouraged to think of as emblematic.
The store has a heritage website with a reverential timeline and, in Leeds, a gleaming archive (unlike, it is noted, its competitors) reflecting its “long history” and featuring, for instance, early bras, tea sets and vintage packaging. So we can be confident that, if the company gets permission to destroy its landmark building in Oxford Street, something of this discarded heritage will be accessible and respectfully curated. It could be harder for the company’s historians to be accurate, without jeopardising its extravagant claims to superior ethical, environmental, cultural and community values, about how it came to justify its right to smash it up in the first place.
The scheme was initially approved last year by (the then Conservative) Westminster city council. It was called in by the communities secretary, Michael Gove, and a planning inquiry is now hearing why M&S thinks it should be allowed to demolish handsome, Portland stone-clad Orchard House, which sits in a section of Oxford Street still holding its own against dodgy sweetshops. The building was designed almost a century ago to complement the adjacent, grander Selfridges, now Grade II* listed. The Twentieth Century Society describes it as a “playful and deferential neighbour”.
Orchard House survived the blitz, including the massive raid that destroyed John Lewis, but now finds itself in a condition (according to a company video that is presumably meant to be persuasive) as “not fit for its historic Oxford Street location”. M&S wants to celebrate its “nearly 100 years at the arch” by knocking down Orchard House and its extensions. Its plan is endorsed from next door, for what it’s worth, by Selfridges’ new Thailand- and Austria-based owners. The planned replacement is an unfortunate glass-and-steel assemblage with further floors piled atop a kind of jutting lid that could admittedly look perfect in Dubai or one of our more tragic out-of-town shopping centres. That is, as the Twentieth Century Society put it in a scrupulously polite letter to M&S, “characterless and undistinguished”.
Even if the scheme were not ugly, its cost in carbon emissions would still, as expert witnesses and protesters have shown, be environmentally irresponsible and a terrible precedent. M&S could, had it chosen to live by its earlier pronouncements on sustainability (“because there is no plan B”), have gone for a comprehensive retrofit. Instead, the demolition and new build is expected to release just under 40,000 tonnes of CO₂ – authorised by a council that had declared a climate emergency. Not just incompatible with government commitments on net zero, the scheme is also strikingly at odds, customers have noticed, with company effusions that were only “reinvigorated” in 2021. “We know our customers want to do the right thing for the planet,” M&S oozes in its annual report. “Doing the right thing is in our nature and as a company embedded in our values.”
Maybe doing the right thing was just too deeply embedded, practically to the point of invisibility, for anyone to spot that the company’s latest argument for demolishing Orchard House, aired at the opening of the inquiry, sounded distinctly menacing. Representing M&S, Russell Harris KC said it would up and quit if thwarted, and warned – this was not just any threat, but a Marks & Spencer’s threat – of the calamitous consequences. No other retailer would step in, he said. “Without M&S at this location – and [we] will leave if the application fails – the decline of this area of the centre will accelerate dramatically.” Capisce?
This was not – as noted by Harris’s opposite number appearing for SAVE Britain’s Heritage, which has led the campaign against the M&S scheme – “the constructive attitude of a retailer dedicated to sustainability, heritage conservation and the future success of Oxford Street”.
In fact, from the time it encountered resistance to its development, Marks & Spencer’s response has appeared strangely at odds with its lovably Percyish commitment – “Enhancing Lives. Every Day” – to good citizenship. When, for instance, Gove called in the redevelopment, Percy’s creators described the decision as “baseless”. Gove was accused of “political grandstanding” that would have a “chilling effect for regeneration across the country”. His department rebuked M&S for a “disappointing and misleading” statement.
There was, you might think, another hint of trotters of clay in the company’s choice of the eminent Russell Harris – Planning Magazine’s “king of complex and contentious tall building schemes in central London” – to restate its aversion to planning interference. If Harris’s clients fairly recently failed to get approval (from the same inquiry inspector) for the horrendous “Tulip”, and the hardly less ghastly “Chiswick Curve”, the lawyer takes credit for his part in erecting the “Walkie-Talkie”, or “what the fuck’s that?”, as people usually call a building vainly opposed by Unesco and English Heritage, subsequently the winner of the Carbuncle Cup and regularly cited as one of the most hated features of London’s skyline.
Suppose Harris succeeds with his dazzling arguments against preservation, eg “in an ideal world the Industrial Revolution would not have happened”, it’s possible the M&S project will bully its way to completion. It would be an unforgivable assault on the climate and also on one valued stretch of Oxford Street, arguably a victory for intimidation – but there could be some amusement in watching the proudly pro-heritage brand (est 1884) trying to finesse its way forward. Not to be threatening, but if it goes ahead with the new build – maybe it could be nicknamed the “Pig” – Orchard House will not be the only thing to be demolished.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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