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The Whiteley is a building with a textured architectural history: of plans both real and imagined, inspired and curtailed, broken and repaired. Neither a discrete restoration project nor an empty site, the task of re-designing The Whiteley presented a particular challenge: that of historical interpretation and contemporary innovation. How could the heritage of the site be respected, while ensuring that the building met the highest sustainability standards possible? How could 150 years of history be expressed in an elegant and technically fluent design, without falling into the artificial, the inauthentic?

Historian and geographer David Lowenthal, often heralded as the founder of heritage studies, stated in a room of UNESCO representatives for the Nara Conference on Authenticity in Relation to World Heritage that architectural authenticity is “never absolute, always relative.” For an architectural team working on a project with heritage aspects today, Lowenthal’s recognition of relativity continues to resonate. It imagines a way of building where parts are connected and considered in terms of the whole, and where dialogues with the past, present, and future remain in open conversation.

This relativity was key in Foster + Partners’ design for The Whiteley – a 150-year-old, once-glittering department store that, until recently, was known as 'Whiteleys’. Located on the Bayswater edge of London’s Hyde Park, the practice was commissioned to revive the building as a mixed-use development including retail, leisure, and residential features. Before plans could be drawn, we needed to investigate the building’s patchwork of intersecting intentions and interventions. From the emergence of William Whiteley’s dream for a department store in the 1850s, to the major redevelopment that will reach the end of construction this year, much of this research was instrumental in establishing the groundwork for our design. There is no set formula; each feature of the project required a bespoke approach and reasoning – guided, but not fully defined – by its past lives. These aspects might seem to fit into a sense of ‘past,’ ‘present,’ or ‘future,’ but – as the structuring of this article suggests – are all connected across time.

Heritage is a relative act. A preservation effort that honours the past is also an investment in a sustainable future; the future-facing urban renewal of Bayswater calls back to Whiteley’s earliest visions for the site, 150 years before.

Imagining an ‘Immense Symposium’

In the summer of 1851, William Whiteley – a boy from Yorkshire, then only twenty years old – visited the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. A celebration of Britain’s colonial and economic success following the Industrial Revolution, the exhibition gathered ‘every conceivable invention,’ (as Queen Victoria wrote in her diary) – from folding pianos, to cutting-edge adding machines, to the largest diamond in the world. A symbol and endorsement of national pride at the height of the British Empire, the exhibition’s varying contents exemplified a modern faith in social, scientific, and artistic progress brought about by technological and geopolitical expansion. Over six million people are estimated to have visited – approximately one in four of the British population – from across all parts of the country, and all social classes.

As an architectural endeavour, the ‘Crystal Palace’ was an immediate success. The gigantic glass building was designed and built by Joseph Paxton in 1851 and took inspiration from the glass of the garden houses that he had previously designed for the Duke of Devonshire. The structure covered eighteen acres of Hyde Park and housed 14,000 exhibitions and 100,000 objects from across the world. It was this context, this vast and proliferating emporium – “one of my favourite buildings,” writes Norman Foster – that William Whiteley encountered.

In 1863, over a decade after his visit, Whiteley established a drapery shop at 31 Westbourne Grove. In 1867, this had matured to seventeen ‘department’-style shops on the same street; by 1872, the store, by now known as Whiteleys, had expanded beyond drapery to offer ‘an immense symposium’ of goods – with Whiteley once boldly claiming that he could provide anything from a door pin to an elephant. Supposedly the target of disgruntled competitors, the successful Westbourne stores were subject to various arson attacks and were burned to the ground in 1887. This did not halt the project, but rather galvanised Whiteley’s ambition; the stores were rebuilt, and Queen Victoria awarded Whiteleys a Royal Warrant in 1896 – a privilege reserved for few businesses.

The establishment’s urban configuration – the stores on Westbourne Grove and a warehouse on Queensway (then ‘Queens Road’), which incidentally connects with Hyde Park and with the memory of Paxton’s Palace – remained for a further decade. In 1907, Whiteley was shot and killed (allegedly by an illegitimate son) before he could see realised the next phase of his ambitions for the growing enterprise. However, despite his death, Whiteley’s ample fortune meant that his grander aspirations could yet become a reality. The company’s board soon decided to move the business to a new purpose-built store on Queensway, next to the existing warehouses.

An Englishman, John Belcher, and a Scot, John James Joass, both notable architects of their day, were commissioned to design the new store. Belcher had recently designed Chartered Accountants Hall (1890), one of the first neo-Baroque buildings in London, and was already established as a lavish Edwardian municipal architect. In 1905, Joass was made a partner in Belcher’s practice and worked on projects including the Royal Insurance Buildings on St James's Street and Piccadilly (1909), and later on, the re-building of the Swan and Edgar department store (1919) at Piccadilly Circus. The pair’s design for Whiteleys had to rival the likes of Harrods (designed by Charles William Stephens and opened in 1905) and Selfridges (designed by Daniel Burnham and opened in 1909).

Belcher, Joass, Curtis Green: Moving to Queensway

Belcher and Joass envisioned a symmetrical design, hailing from an appreciation of classical forms. The building's prevailing feature was a central dome, which brought natural light into the deep-plan store and added ‘an air of dignity to the shop,’ as The Architectural Review reported in March 1912.

Sadly, not all of Belcher and Joass’s plan was realised. Two cupolas were designed for the northern and southern corners of Queen’s Road; however, due to the load-bearing restrictions on the Victorian warehouses on the northern end, only the southern cupola was built. Additionally, their drawings depict Italianate roof gardens with glazed pavilions designed in the form of classical orangeries, for example, which would have provided a mixture of outdoor and indoor leisure space for visitors. Roof gardens, in particular, would have been a distinctive and exceptionally unusual proposition for the time – given their proposal to extend the public realm to the top of an essentially private building.

This first development of Whiteleys was opened by the Lord Mayor of London on 2 November 1911. At the time, it was claimed to be ‘the largest shop in the world’, ‘the most beautiful store in the United Kingdom’, and ‘perfect in every detail of Architecture, Equipment, and Service.’

Whiteleys, though commercially successful, was not universally considered as architecturally fluent. Belcher died in 1913 and, while the first phase of the design was completed, his grand unified idea was never realised. William Curtis Green, who had been articled to Belcher, was later commissioned to complete the much compromised and redesigned second phase between 1925 and 1927. Although Curtis Green followed the architectural language defined by Belcher and Joass, the full symmetry and continuity of the original scheme was never achieved. He was limited by parts of the old Victorian warehouse buildings that had remained from the 1880s, which constrained his design to the different floor levels; the Northern cupola couldn’t be executed either due to the load constraints that these Victorian buildings imposed.

Whiteleys changed hands over the decades. In 1927, shortly after the Curtis-Green-designed development finished, the site was purchased by Harry Gordon Selfridge. It was then bombed during an air raid on 19 October 1940, and subsequently purchased by United Drapery Stores in 1961, a retail group that dominated the British high street from the 1950s to the 1980s. The building later achieved Grade-II-listed status in 1970 but closed in 1981, falling into a state of disrepair, with severe water damage and vandalism enacted on the site. Decades of incremental, inconsistent, and often unsympathetic repairs further distanced the project from the vision of the early twentieth-century original.

Recovering somewhat by the twenty-first century, the building and its tenants were hit once again, this time by the 2008 financial crisis. After the site’s purchase by Meyer Bergman in 2013, and following a successful design competition, Foster + Partners was commissioned to return and elevate ‘The Whiteley’ (a subtle renaming of Whiteleys) to its former glory – this time with a more contemporary mixed-use programme that includes retail, residential, leisure, hotel, and public space. Construction began in 2018 and is set to complete in 2024.

Designing History

The Whiteley is a Grade-II-listed building. Listing protects the fundamental aspects of a building’s physical character and historical significance, while allowing scope for sensitive intervention that brings a building up to contemporary standards. When working with a listed property, comprehensive historic and archival research is undertaken before certain architectural decisions are formed and plans proposed.

Even the task of establishing a linear history of the site proved tricky; site visits revealed details that had circumvented plans and presented as many unknowns as knowns. Demanding far more than a simplistic restoration of the facade, the redevelopment of The Whiteley required the formation of a critical framework that could unite this narrative patchwork of a building and competently ensure standardisation to replicate historical methodologies. This framework needed to incorporate a sensitive heritage lens with the sustainable, integrated, forward-thinking design approach for which Foster + Partners is renowned. Accordingly, and rather than developing a blanket solution, we worked closely with a plethora of specialists to develop a robust and sensitively crafted design – one being Tom Burke, Head of Conservation Design and Sustainability at Westminster City Council. Assembling these integrated, cross-disciplinary teams was essential in realising a project of such craft, authenticity, and historical significance to London.

As with all heritage projects, the design process required a complex negotiation of and stake in an understanding of history itself – what it means, and how it relates to the present day. The architectural team had to grasp this history while adapting and updating the building to meet modern standards and contemporary sustainability requirements, with formal elegance and technical fluency. What version of the building’s complicated past was it set to inherit (or override), and where could interventions be made – either as authentic continuations or innovative additions to the structure?

Full article here: Heritage and Innovation: Reviving the Whiteley