Selfridges store lift

Installed in 1928 to mark Selfridges’ imminent twentieth anniversary, these lifts once stood in the store’s glamorous new central entrance on Oxford Street. They were part of eight Art Deco showpieces that helped stitch together the expanding department store, where Harry Gordon Selfridge - the self-styled 'showman of shopping' - turned everyday errands into theatre. Their bronze and ironwork doors and surround, alive with Zodiac figures crafted by the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, introduced customers to a world where modern retail promised luxury for everyone.

The car interior is decorated by French metalworker Edgar Brandt with three storks circling a radiant sun, a design Selfridge reportedly spotted at the 1925 Paris exhibition that defined the Art Deco style. These lifts weren’t just transport: they were a taste of cutting-edge continental design for ordinary Londoners, combining the handcrafted ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement with the gleaming geometry of the new age. The cars were operated by 'lift girls', young women in crisp tailored uniforms who quickly became minor celebrities of the shop floor. Newspapers described them as some of the 'best-informed women in London', thanks to the conversations that they overheard. After the Second World War they were replaced by disabled ex-servicemen.

Bomb damage flooded the lift shafts during the Blitz, but after repairs they kept going for decades, carrying thousands of shoppers a day between the bargain basement and the famous rooftop gardens. By the 1950s a single car was travelling around 4.5 miles daily, its doors opening roughly 2,000 times - a reminder that even Selfridge's most glamorous creations were hard-working machines. Escalators finally replaced them in 1972; this object is among the last and most complete survivors of the store’s celebrated 1928 lifts.