Lindy Woodhead’s biography Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge was published in 2007. Six years later, Mr Selfridge, a British TV drama based on Woodhead’s book, was first broadcast on both sides of the Atlantic. A second and third series have followed, with viewers from Afghanistan to Sweden following the operatic life and times of Harry Gordon Selfridge. No wonder. The story of the Wisconsin-born retailer who left school at 14, rose to become a partner in Marshall Field’s, Chicago – founded in 1852, it was one of the first and most ambitious US department stores – and then re-created the department store for the 20th Century in London, has it all: the highs, the lows, glamour, scandal, commercial and public acclaim and the ultimate crash landing not of the store that bears his name, but of a once stellar career.
Harry Gordon Selfridge had distinguished himself at Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago, which remained a landmark in the city until Macy’s bought it in 2005
Selfridge had done well with Marshall Field’s. He liked to say, “The customer is always right,” which made the Chicago store popular. And he reputedly invented the catchphrase “Only [so many] Shopping Days Until Christmas”. When he visited London on holiday in 1906 he was surprised to find most of the city’s department stores – Harrods had only recently completed its retail palace in Knightsbridge – lacked the panache and drama of their American and Parisian rivals. This led Selfridge to leave the US and establish a singularly magnificent department store, bearing his name, at the west end of London’s Oxford Street.
![At Marshall Field’s, Selfridge had come up with enduring slogans like “the customer is always right” and “only [so many] shopping days until Christmas”](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.bbc.com/culture/bespoke/story/20150326-a-history-of-the-department-store/media/the_customer_is_always_right_700-lr_2z3xkyv.jpg)
At Marshall Field’s, Selfridge had come up with enduring slogans like “the customer is always right” and “only [so many] shopping days until Christmas”
The initial design was by Daniel Burnham, a big-spirited American architect who had worked for Marshall Field’s and, significantly, had designed much of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a successor to London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. One of Burnham’s assistants in London was Thomas Tait, one of whose major works was the extension to the British Museum of 1905. In Oxford Street, Selfridge’s design team shaped an ambitious Beaux Arts classical palace – or indeed museum – of a building, its noble ionic facade rising above a wall of plate glass windows.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o67CZ5qopV%2BYwq3A1KucaJqVqL2wt8Roqq2noq58c3yQbmdsamZirm60yKyrqKqpYrynedOhnGaclaWus8DMnqWtZaOpvLOxjqKlnZ2oY7W1ucs%3D