The history of Peter Jones

Origins

In 1864 a young Welshman, Peter Jones (1843-1905), arrived in London and lost no time getting himself a job at Tarn's, a draper's in Newington, moving after a while to a larger shop in Leicester Square. Not long after, he opened his first shop in Hackney and, by 1871, he had moved twice more, first to Southampton Row and then to Chelsea, where he took a lease on two small shops in what is now Draycott Avenue.

He knocked the two shops into one and put in a new front before launching into business as a 'co-operative' draper. Less than a year later, disaster struck. The weakened party wall collapsed, the new front beam broke and the houses fell down.

It was rumoured that Peter Jones got substantial compensation from the landlord. Whether that is true or not, he was soon planning a bold expansion. In 1877 he moved again, this time to two small shops in the more exclusive part of Chelsea, at the Sloane Square end of the King's Road.

The business flourished. In the first year turnover surged to £18,000, compared with £8,000 at the old site, and in the fifth year it had reached £40,000. The new shop soon spilled over into no less than twenty-eight houses and was elaborately rebuilt. In 1900, the business was floated as a public company with Mr. Jones as Chairman and his two sons on the Board of Directors. The 1902/3 turnover reached a record £157,000 with profits of nearly £12,000.

It was a sign of Peter Jones' modern outlook that he was one of the first to install electric lighting in a large store and he provided well for his staff. Most of them lived above the shop in residential quarters which were 'replete with every appointment that is conducive to social enjoyment', including a well-stocked library, a piano for musical evenings and a couple of billiard tables.

A change of ownership

In 1903 Peter Jones fell ill and died two years later at the age of sixty-two. Without him at the helm the shop had begun to falter, and shortly after his death in 1905, another self-made man, John Lewis, proprietor of the John Lewis department store in Oxford Street, bought Peter Jones' share of the business for just £22,500. John Lewis (1836-1928) became the Chairman and made his son, Spedan, a director.

Where John Lewis had succeeded so brilliantly with his Oxford Street shop, he failed with Peter Jones. One of his first acts was to cut the advertising expenditure from £2000 to nil and the business slumped by £20,000. By 1909, turnover had dropped below £95,000 and the ordinary shareholders were not pleased. Finally, in 1914, now aged seventy-eight and tired of failure, John Lewis handed the enterprise over to his son, Spedan.

Spedan Lewis (1885-1963) was a revolutionary thinker. He believed that the rewards from a business should be shared with those who created them and that workers were entitled to have a say in and be kept informed about the business in which they worked.

The design met the needs both of aesthetics and practicality. The architects achieved a continuous run of glass on the ground floor, thus optimising the window display space - a point upon which Spedan Lewis was most insistent - and inside, the shop was light, airy and open plan in complete contrast to the old premises.

Despite the physical changes, Peter Jones retained its ethos of service, quality products and value for money, and the residents of Chelsea continued to flock to its doors. The shop survived the war and, as the economy started to recover, business once again flourished. 1963 was a milestone year when, for the first time, turnover reached £5 million.

A shop fit for the new millennium

The year 2000 saw the beginning of major changes. The Partnership put aside over £100 million on a complete renovation, which began in February 1999. The intention was to retain the shop's distinctive character but to provide all the facilities which would characterise the Partnership's newest department stores.

The refurbishment would increase the space by about 21%; add new services, including air conditioning; rationalise the geography of the upper floors; reposition the escalators in a dramatic central atrium and provide new restaurants on the second and sixth floors.

In order for phase one of the renovation to begin, it was necessary to move a number of departments out of the main shop. These were relocated in part of the shop’s warehouse in Draycott Avenue, off the King's Road. Needless to say, considerable work was needed to turn a warehouse into a selling area, but the result was spacious and modern, the design sympathetic to the architecture of the building, but recognisably a Partnership shop.

Appropriately named PJ2, the winner of a competition among Partners, it opened in May 2000; a courtesy shuttle bus service ran between the two shops.

In the meantime, in the unique shop on the corner of Sloane Square and the King’s Road, where the great experiment in partnership began, trading continued. Partners eagerly awaited the first major phase of the restoration: the central atrium, which opened on 5 June 2002.

Two years later, on 28 June 2004, after five years and £107 million, the renovation of Peter Jones was finally completed, with the return of the Furniture department to the Fifth floor. The renewed Peter Jones was officially opened by the then Chairman Sir Stuart Hampson, in time for the centenary of the shop's acquisition by John Lewis in 1905.

More information

For more information on the history of the John Lewis Partnership visit The Memory Store.