Oct 26, 2021
Ikea buys former Topshop Oxford Circus flagship
Ikea is buying the former flagship Topshop store on Oxford Circus for its latest city-centre shop in what the world's largest furniture group branded a long-term vote of confidence in retail in London and the UK. The group is paying £378m for 214 Oxford Street and will have its own store with accessories, some furniture and planning studios in about a third of the 22,200 sq m space over seven floors. The collapse into administration last year of department store chain Debenhams and Sir Philip Green's retail empire Arcadia - the owner of Burton, Dorothy Perkins and a number of other fashion brands as well as Topshop - has left gaps in high streets around the UK. Ikea is increasingly moving away from only having big-box stores on the outskirts of big cities and is experimenting with different types of city-centre outlets from kitchen-planning studios and click-and-collect points to locations holding thousands of different products such as one in Paris. Its Oxford Circus store will not open until 2023 but will follow one in Hammersmith due to open in the next few months. The former Topshop site, which was home to the flagship UK store in Green's Arcadia empire, had been pledged as security for the defunct group's defined benefit pension scheme under an agreement reached with the trustees and the UK Pension Regulator in 2019. "We will not switch too much into ecommerce. Oxford Street is much more accessible and is [a] way to widen the opportunities of customers to meet Ikea retail," he added.
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