Tears and meatballs as Ikea opens in Oxford Street

Telegraph

01-05-2025

The Great British stiff upper lip rarely wobbles. But for Louis Jackson, all it took to set the waterworks off was the opening of a furniture store.
The florist, 31, was second in line in the queue when Ikea's new store in central London's Oxford Street opened on Thursday.
When the moment came at 10am, after a countdown by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, the plastic bag sheeting split to reveal scores of cheering yellow-clad staff members and waving Swedish and British flags.
'It was very overwhelming being welcomed into the shop like that,' said Mr Jackson, who left with a £2.95 salmon wrap. 'I actually cried because, really, I've never been into a store that had so many people welcoming you like a family.'
Christian Grigore, 36, was first in a line which snaked along the shopfront and down into a makeshift airport-style queue area on the adjoining Great Portland Street.
The self-employed IT worker arrived just before dawn from his home in Stratford, east London, and made his way straight to the cafeteria for a breakfast of the flatpack giant's famous meatballs.
'I'm starving,' he said as he brandished an Ikea-branded water bottle, umbrella and bag handed out to shield queuers from the unseasonably warm 20C morning sun.
But the early risers' efforts, in the end, counted for nothing when a throng of half a dozen Londoners jumped the queue and rushed into the shop as soon as it opened.
As cheers erupted from the queue and a crowd on Oxford Street 's central reservation, security guards proved unable to stop those who barged in as yellow-shirted staff members pleaded for them to stop.
Inside the shop, which is laid out over three floors stretching deep underground, matters soon took on an atmosphere of the surreal.
As a DJ blasted deafening dance classics and shop assistants ditched shelf-stacking for body popping, three ladies of the St John's Ambulance pottered about – seemingly there to rescue any exhausted shoppers stranded in its subterranean depths.
The size of the Ikea was impressive. While it is but a shadow of the chain's sprawling out-of-town locations, a full complement of crockery, soft furnishings and cabinets made for plenty of choice in a remarkably convenient location for boxed-up city dwellers.
But as The Telegraph descended deeper down its winding layout, the spectre of possible hallucination began to seem increasingly likely as the rumbling of the London underground sounded through the walls.
Shoppers were having their photograph taken next to a gigantic 4ft-high meatball, while next door a saxophonist played the blues surrounded by six kitchens.
In the children's area, the sounds of the jungle squawked through a loudspeaker over soft toy snakes, sharks and monkeys piled high like a Peta activist's worst nightmare.
Then, someone said: 'Welcome to my bedroom.' It was a moustachioed drag queen, encircled by double beds, wearing a denim trouser suit with a Palestine flag badge and a transgender sticker.