Rising in the East

Last Friday we ran a tour of the Westfield Stratford City site for Retail Week readers, and I hadn’t been down for a few months either so it was interesting to see how it was taking shape. It’s certainly a lot further down the road than it’s sister scheme in Shepherds Bush was six months before completion, with the anchor tenants M&S and John Lewis already fitting out their stores, and so the signs are good for an on-time opening.

The M&S store looks interesting, with the signage on the front spelling out ‘fashion, food, home’ more explicitly than I’ve seen before, while John Lewis’s exterior boasts a very intricate ring pattern, presumably an interpretation of the Olympic rings logo (while obviously not infringing its copyright!)

Elsewhere the unit shops haven’t been handed over yet, but most of them appear to have retailers allocated to them. Part of the ‘deal’ with the tour was that I’m not allowed to report the names hanging over the shops which haven’t been announced yet, as not all the deals have been formally signed yet, but I was interested to see the number of more upmarket fashion retailers going to the scheme - not top luxury brands like at Westfield London, but certainly aspirational upper middle market ones.

While architecturally it has a lot in common with Westfield London, the layout of the scheme is very different. It’s in a D shape, with M&S at one corner and John Lewis and Waitrose at the other. The straight side of the D takes the form of an open street with some aspirational brands, while the curved part is a three-level indoor mall, with food and convenience shopping on the lowest level and comparison goods, mostly fashion, on the other two.

The Olympics is going to create a huge buzz around Stratford and the work on the stadiums and the athletes village is transforming the area. But that’s only two weeks, and actually will probably be two weeks of complete mayhem, although big sales too. What’s actually more significant from a retail point of view is the transformation the games is prompting in the area, and how perceptions of Stratford - which is unquestionably a down-at-heel area at the moment - will change, which should draw in shoppers from a wider area of east London and Essex.