Hot off the press

Heals is one of those stores that has been around for ever. Well, almost. The furniture and homewares retailer on central London’s Tottenham Court Road in fact celebrates its bicentennial this year.

Since setting up in the developing world of organised retail of 1810, the Heals store that one sees today has come to be regarded as a place that you go to pick up something special that will place you among the ranks of the arts- and design-led mob who find their homes just up the road in edgy Camden or old money, new liberal Hampstead.

So far, so what.

What this means in practice is that this is a top person’s store for the arts and crafts crew and somewhere that the great majority of visitors to this long thoroughfare are going to struggle to afford.

Heals may have seen rivals come and go along Tottenham Court Road, but this has not made it any more egalitarian along the way.

Last week however, an event to mark the completion of the store’s second century kicked off in its windows.

In the normal run of things, Heals has carefully orchestrated and tastefully organised window displays.

Last week however — and it all finished yesterday, so don’t go looking — the windows were a mess. In place of perhaps an array of bentwood chairs, aesthetically severe looking sofas and upscale dining vignettes, the entire window-line had been occupied by art students from the nearby Slade school of art.

Never the tidiest at the best of times, the groovy studes had set up a ramshackle studio within the windows.

The studio offered shoppers the chance to drop in and take part in the creation of art installations, maybe buy a fresh off the press wood-block print or breathe onto a copper-plate and then see then see the shape that this made collated with others to form a further art work.

Sound a bit arty?

Well perhaps. But it was attracting shoppers into the store in their droves and was quite the most interesting thing on Tottenham Court Road for some time.

And the point about what was being done was that it involved interacting with shoppers, providing them with a real reason to stop and drop in. The fact that it was only vaguely related to what was being sold was coincidental.

This was perfectly on brand for this landmark London retailer and it showed what can be done with relatively little in the way of resources and a lot of imagination.