In My View by Eric Musgrave: When will Jenners’ doors reopen?

Good things come to those who wait, or so we are told.

In Edinburgh, residents, visitors and city centre retailers presumably are hoping for good things from the re-opening of the historic building on Princes Street that housed the Jenners department store from 1895 until 2021.

When the doors to a possible six floors of retail space, bars and restaurants, and a boutique hotel might open, however, is unclear. On the website for the project, a line from about three years ago states: It is anticipated the building will reopen in 2025.

With only a few weeks to go until 2026 is upon us, that deadline clearly has slipped but at the time of writing, all the Jenners team could tell me is they “cannot disclose a date at this point”.

How odd.

The reimagining of this Victorian retailing masterpiece – the Category A-listed creation of Scottish architect William Hamilton Beattie – is the vision of Anders Holch Povlson, who is best known to TheIndustry.fashion readers as the owner of the Danish Bestseller group, which has Jack & Jones, Vera Moda and Only, plus many more, in its extensive brand stable.

The billionaire, who is the biggest private landowner in Scotland through his purchase of several large estates, paid a reported £53m for the Jenners building in 2017 through his property company AAA United. The restoration work began in 2021 with planning permission granted in 2022.

A high-calibre team has been assembled to run The Jenners Building, as the project is currently styled. The managing director is Andrew Keith, who was CEO of Selfridges during 2021-2024 after a near-20-year career at Lane Crawford in Hong Kong. The brand director, James Harrison, headed up strategy at Selfridges from 2021 until earlier this year.

The Jenners department store was closed in 2021

The building comprises around 190,000sq ft (c 17,500m²) across nine floors (although this may be reduced to six during rebuilding). The original refurbishment plan included 108,000sq ft (10, 000m²) of hotel space (current estimates for the number of rooms varies between 90 and 115), and around 75,000sq ft (c7,000m²) of retail space, as well as cafes and restaurants.

British firm David Chipperfield Architects is responsible for the design.

Information boards on the hoardings around the site promise “high-end retail and hospitality” and state: “The project will create a new, contemporary department store within the most public facing, historically significant, parts of the building.”

Property sources in Scotland have told me the “contemporary department store” will be created by Povlsen and his recent hires, rather than an existing operator being invited in.

Despite the lack of a confirmed date, there is no doubt Edinburgh will welcome a new upmarket retail and hospitality venue, especially on Princes Street. Once the prime shopping parade of the Scottish capital, it now suffers generally from a downmarket image, a situation that has been amplified since 2021 by the opening nearby of the impressive St James Quarter, which is adjacent to the upmarket Multrees Walk, which has been Edinburgh’s premier retailing enclave since 2003. It is home to  Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Burberry and Max Mara among others.

As well as (hopefully) bringing in some fresh retail attractions, the rebirth of Jenners will add some much-needed high-class accommodation to Edinburgh, which is noticeably lacking in places suitable for high-rolling visitors. The St James Quarter has an impressive W Hotel (the first outside London), but the grande dame of Edinburgh hotels is The Balmoral, which sits over Waverley Station, a few hundred yards east of Jenners. By coincidence, The Balmoral was also designed by William Hamilton Beattie.

St James Quarter

According to Visit Scotland, in 2024, there were 5.05m overnight visits to Edinburgh and a total overnight tourism spend of £2.6bn. That’s the cake Povlson would like a slice of, and who can blame him?

Established in 1838 as a linen draper by Charles Kennington and Charles Jenner, Jenners, like most venerable department stores, developed during the Victorian era. In 1895 the current building was a huge symbol of retailing confidence. For more than a century, Jenners was owned and run by the Douglas-Miller family, who sold out to House of Fraser in 2005.

At one time central Edinburgh was very well represented with department stores. House of Fraser had its own store (originally trading as Binns) at the other end of Princes Street until 2018; the premises now house a Johnnie Walker Whiskey centre. Debenhams was also on Princes Street until the business collapsed in 2021; last year Criterion Capital announced it planned to convert the building into Scotland’s first Zedwell hotel. One block east of Jenners was R W Forsyth, another upmarket department store that traded in Edinburgh from 1906 until the Glasgow-based company ceased trading in 1983. That building was last occupied by Topshop and Topman, which closed in 2021; it appears to have been unoccupied since.

Readers with long memories may also recall smaller Scottish department store names such as Goldbergs, Smalls, Blyths, J & R Allan, Grants, Peter Allan and Patrick Thomsons, which all operated in the city in the post-Second World War period.

Today the much-reduced department store sector is represented in the centre of the Scottish capital only by John Lewis, which has its store as an anchor tenant in the St James Quarter complex, and Harvey Nichols, which has traded overlooking St Andrew Square as part of the Multrees Walk development since 2002.

The imposing façade of the Jenners building is being used as a large-scale advertising hoarding. A few months ago a large banner promoted Harvey Nichols, which is just a few minutes’ walk away.

Industry rumours persist that Harvey Nichols’ Hong Kong-based owner Sir Dickson Poon may soon grow tired of funding the struggling business, which has other regional branches in Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds and Manchester as well as the flagship in Knightsbridge.

Former CEO Joseph Wan, who retired in 2013 after 23 years with Harvey Nicks, was famous for negotiating exceptionally favourable deals with landlords who wanted the once-Absolutely Fabulous store as a tenant.

Those low-rent periods must be over by now, property industry observers believe, so the HN stores have presumably demanding rents to pay while the luxury sector feels a squeeze.

It would be a curious irony if Edinburgh’s current premium department store was to close before its new rival in The Jenners Building makes its debut.