Latest news with #OxfordCircus
The Guardian
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Topshop sets stage for high street return – but can it go beyond nostalgia?
London fashion week begins in mid-September but showgoers will be starting early this season, with Topshop's first return to the catwalk in seven years taking place next weekend. Open to the public and likely to feature the campaign star Cara Delevingne, it's the latest evidence to confirm that the beloved high street brand is back. Topshop, once a rite of passage for young women finding their style on the high street, was bought by Asos in 2021 when its parent company, Philip Green's Arcadia, went into administration. But its flagship store, the 90,000-sq-ft (8,400 sq metres) shopping destination at Oxford Circus in central London, closed later that year and the brand's relevance diminished. The Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, who bought a 75% stake in the company last year, is hoping to change that. The prospect of Topshop's return in bricks and mortar has been greeted with glee by shoppers who remember its golden age in the 90s and 00s. Elle's contributing editor Laura Antonia Jordan says part of this is down to nostalgia for the Oxford Circus store, 'going down the escalators and potentially losing hours in there'. The Vogue fashion writer Olivia Allen expresses a similar sentiment. 'It was like an immersive amusement park for the teenage girl,' she says. 'The closest you could get to living inside a coming-of-age makeover movie.' Allen, who describes herself as 'geriatric gen Z', says the store itself will be central to Topshop cementing its position with a new generation. 'It was a meeting point and the unspoken go-to for any trip to London,' she says. 'Without this, I'm not sure Topshop will ever have the same cachet.' Michelle Wilson, the managing director of Asos, has confirmed that standalone stores are coming, telling Drapers in June: 'That's something that we are working on all the time.' Topshop was founded in 1964 in Sheffield, catering to teenagers. A decade later, the first standalone store opened, and Topman was established in 1978. The Oxford Circus store opened in 1994. Other triumphs included sellout fashion collaborations with designers including JW Anderson and Christopher Kane, as well as Kate Moss from 2007. At its height, Topshop had 300 stores in the UK and 11 in the US. Part of this success was managed by Jane Shepherdson, its brand director from 1997 to 2007, who was often described as the most influential person on the high street. Shepherdson says it was, in large part, down to the creative team behind the brand. 'We had a shared vision. What we wanted to do was to completely exceed and blow away our customers' expectations,' she says. 'Give them something that was so much better than they were expecting.' Sign up to Fashion Statement Style, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved after newsletter promotion She mentions the collaborations and the now-classic shearling coats – 'something that Topshop wouldn't normally do' – as examples of this. 'An awful lot of it was done on instinct,' she adds. Jordan says there is 'still a gap in the market for well-designed affordable clothes', something that the team behind Topshop are aware of. Speaking to the Sunday Times, Wilson distanced the brand from fast fashion and said prices were likely to be £50 for a pair of jeans and £100 for a dress. (Shein, by contrast, would charge about £18 and £19 respectively.) The brand comes under Asos's 'fashion with integrity' strategy, which monitors supply chains. Catherine Shuttleworth, a retail consultant and the chief executive of Savvy Marketing, says this chimes with how younger customers are thinking. 'When they were 12 or 13 they were buying stuff from Pretty Little Thing, Boohoo,' she says. 'They're looking for a brand that reflects the life that they believe in, which is still Instagrammable but with more values, a bit more exclusive.' Nostalgia for Topshop is particularly keenly felt by millennials and older members of gen Z, but the question remains how far this feeling can take the brand. 'I guess the dilemma for the new Topshop is: are you appealing to the millennial demographic for whom it was a real rite of passage or are you going after the version of us now?' says Jordan. 'I don't know if it can charm them in the same way because they are spoiled for choice.'
The Independent
30-07-2025
- The Independent
Mapped: London's knife crime hotspots revealed
Knife crime in London has surged by nearly 60 per cent in the past three years, new analysis has revealed. The West End is the capital's knife crime hotspot, accounting for one in every 15 knife attacks in London, the report from the Policy Exchange think tank said. The research found that in 2024, one small area of around 20 streets in London's West End near Oxford Circus and Regent Street had more knife crime than nearly 15 per cent of the rest capital combined. Across the UK, knife crime recorded by the police decreased by 1 per cent in the year ending March 2025 to 53,047 offences, compared to the previous year, which saw 53,685 offences. The Metropolitan Police, which is the force for most of London, accounted for 31 per cent of all knife crime across England and Wales in 2024. There were 108 knife crime offences in the highest hotspot in the West End, which was more than the 716 'safest' areas combined. This area includes Oxford Circus and parts of New Bond Street, Oxford Street, Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus. These areas, known as Lower-layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs), are geographical areas which comprise of comprise a resident population of between 1,000 and 3,000 people. The top 200 LSOAs for knife crime within London reported 3,615 knife crimes in 2024, according to Policy Exchange. The report recommended that the Met Police should introduce a 'zero tolerance' approach in the top 20 knife crime hotspots. Officers in these areas would conduct 'very high volumes' of stop and searches, it suggested. It also recommended that permanent live facial recognition systems should be deployed in each of the top knife crime hotspots in London, with officers deployed at peak times. David Spencer, a former Met detective and author of the report, said: 'The only approach which will both work and be recognised by the public as working is a 'zero-tolerance' approach to crime and criminals – particularly in those locations where crime is rife.' Most knife crime offences in London are robberies, official statistics show, with mobile phones a key target. Of the 16,789 knife crime offences committed in 2024, 62 per cent (10,346) of these were robberies. Earlier this year, The Independent revealed there were at least 83,900 phone theft offences recorded across the country in the 12 months to July last year – almost double the 45,800 five years previously. The figures obtained from 29 forces show the Metropolitan Police dealt with more than three-quarters of all mobile phone thefts (64,224) last year, followed by Kent Police (1,722), South Yorkshire Police (1,577) and Lancashire Police (1,467). Commander Hayley Sewart, lead for knife crime at the Metropolitan Police Service, said: 'Tackling violent crime is our top priority and every month across London we are making over 1,000 more arrests than we were last year - with knife-related crime (16 per cent) and robbery (13 per cent) both falling significantly. 'We are putting more officers in neighbourhoods than ever before, using our stop and search powers to take 17,500 weapons off the streets over the past four years, and deploying new technology and data-driven tactics to bring offenders to justice.' A spokesperson for the mayor of London said: 'Nothing is more important to the mayor than keeping Londoners safe and he is determined to continue leading from the front to build a safer London for all. 'Thanks to the hard work of the Met Police and partners, homicides, gun crime with lethal barrel discharges, knife crime with injury and burglary are all down since 2016 and last year teen murders were the lowest they've been in over a decade.' 'Record funding from the mayor and an enhanced approach to neighbourhood policing in the West End has led to personal robberies falling by 20 per cent and violence with injury reducing by 25 per cent in the last year. 'The mayor is determined to build on this progress – his record £1.16bn funding has secured 935 police officers and he has worked closely with the commissioner to increase the number of police officers on the beat in the West End, plus additional police officers working in new or enhanced town centre teams in hotspot areas.'
Times
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
This musical is a five-star sensation — it hit my senses first, then my brain
Just this once, believe the hype. Evita's much publicised balcony scene, in which Rachel Zegler's Eva Perón serenades the good people of Oxford Circus with Don't Cry for Me Argentina while the audience inside watch on a giant screen, is a joy. But Jamie Lloyd's revival of the 1978 musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice feels like a conveyor belt of highlights, one after the other. Amping up the revival he first staged at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park in 2019, Lloyd moves it indoors — and then blows the roof off. This Evita is simply sensational. That alfresco balcony scene is both an outlier and a hallmark of the boundary-pushing fun to be found throughout. Cameras follow Zegler as she swaps this Eva's uniform of bra top and hot pants for her more familiar white suit. It could so easily be naff, yet the clash of artifice and reality — why, there's a glimpse of the crowd standing outside the Pret next door! — makes for a great moment. It's as exciting as Tom Francis's walk round the block in Lloyd's Sunset Boulevard (with Nicole Scherzinger) but drilled deeper into the storytelling. Why? Because it's our sole glimpse of Eva, the wife of the authoritarian president Juan Perón, facing her public. She glances at the cameras to make us her confidants as she puts on her show. And then the cameras follow her as she strides back on stage to sing High Flying, Adored from the top of the wide bank of steps that is Soutra Gilmour's set. Kapow! • The best shows in London and the UK to book now The kapows keep coming. The remarkable sound of the requiem at the start, from a huge cast shrouded in cowls, smoke and spotlights. Diego Andres Rodriguez as our narrator, Che, striding around casually for Oh What a Circus, and ending up half-naked and bloodied. The sinuous, half-dressed chorus who bump, grind, crawl and tango their way across the steps, creating the world of mid-century Buenos Aires, telling stories with their bodies alone (a medal, please, for the choreographer Fabian Aloise). Haze and spotlights add to the sense of place, of forward motion and sexual desire. Is this the most sensual Lloyd Webber production of them all? It feels radical, yet also rooted in faithful, full-hearted renditions of some of his catchiest tunes. At the centre of it all is the American Zegler, 24, oozing starry command. Making herself strategically doll-like as she plays with the patriarchy, her Eva is always magnetic. Zegler aces the charisma and, not least, vocal power required of an approach that's sometimes more like a Beyoncé stadium show than a West End musical. All that notoriety for her brash comments about Snow White suddenly feels old. A star is reborn. • Read more theatre reviews, guides and interviews Is there collateral damage from Lloyd's ever-stylish, rarely literal approach? Yes, there is some loss of clarity, even if you always get the gist, and some of Rice's adroit lyrics get lost in the gig-level amplification. The songs and the story are less compelling in the more contemplative conclusion. The worst this ever is, though, is a truly great concert performance. It is properly sensational, in that it hits the senses first, the brain second. Did I feel huge amounts for our morally ambiguous heroine? Not really. Did I care that I didn't care? Not really. What a circus. What a parade. ★★★★★London Palladium What have you enjoyed at the theatre recently? Let us know in the comments below and follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
Daily Mail
10-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Wife of retail baron Sir Philip Green in lucrative property deal
As TopShop is poised for a High Street comeback, the wife of retail baron Sir Philip Green has made a lucrative property investment near the chain's former flagship store on London's Oxford Circus. Monaco-based Tina Green, 75, owns 20 flats in a complex near Marble Arch via her Guernsey-based vehicle P17 Investments, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. Lady Green owned Topshop's parent company Arcadia, which was run by her husband. She bought the leasehold apartments at Garrett Mansions, off Edgware Road, in August 2020, three months before Arcadia was put into administration. Stores were closed during the second coronavirus lockdown in November 2020 with the loss of 13,000 jobs, and the brand names sold to online competitors. Apartments at Garrett Mansions, which has a pool, spa and gym, sell for £1.4 million. It would make Lady Green's investment worth as much as £28 million. Topshop returned to physical retail for the first time in four years with a one-day, pop-up event yesterday in Shoreditch, East London, ahead of a rumoured High Street comeback.
Times
30-04-2025
- Lifestyle
- Times
Garum restaurant review: ‘I'd go back for the carbonara again'
Right, here are three excellent places you could have lunch: one mad, one posh, one quick. Those are the three basic paradigms, right? Because if you're planning to have lunch today, then you're either going to be thinking, 'Hmm, I've got a lot on. I'll grab something tasty but swift,' or, 'I've got a couple of hours. I fancy something interesting,' or, 'I'm a man of means. I deserve something properly posh today.' Shall we go to the quick place first, get it out of the way? Great. Tenmaru. It's a nice authentic little ramen joint, everything made on site, proper Japanese values, which opened in Finsbury Park in 2019 and spawned a second site behind Oxford Circus just round the corner from my office
