Retail therapy: with sympathy and imagination, a well-loved London landmark has been given a new lease of life by radical alteration and thorough internal revision.

Peter Jones is one of the few fine urban Modern Movement buildings made in Britain between the Wars. The department store in Sloane Square was acquired by the thrusting John Lewis retail group in 1905, the boom age of London's retail buildings: Harrods and Selfridges, for instance, opened in the first years of the twentieth century. Gradually, Peter Jones grew, though it was never so big as the other two. After John Lewis died in 1928, his idealistic son, Spedan, decided to turn the firm into a 'partnership', with one of the first successful profit-sharing schemes to be evolved in British capitalism.

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Spedan Lewis was anxious to make a building that could reflect the modernity and decency of his great idea. In 1932, he commissioned Charles Reilly, professor of the Liverpool University school and the doyen of the architectural profession, to make a new store. Reilly, was approaching retirement and, though largely a follower of the Beaux Arts, he suggested his brilliant young Modernist student William Crabtree for the job; Crabtree in turn asked for help with the huge job from Slater & Moberly, an established commercial practice. But the result, finished in 1939, was clearly driven mainly by Crabtree, who had studied Mendelsohn's brilliant Schocken stores in Germany. Like the Mendelsohn buildings in Stuttgart and Chemnitz, Peter Jones has a fluid exterior and an interior illuminated by lightwells (what we now call atria). The German stores were in turn derived from French precedents, like Eiffel's Bon Marche in Paris (1887), which is simultaneously a celebration of the wonders of bourgeois capitalism and the amazing potential of iron and glass to create indoor promenades.

Before the Second World War, Sloane Square was a moment of change between rich and (relatively) poor. To the east is Eaton Square, the poshest address in London, lined by houses of dukes and multi-millionaires, and down the King's Road, which leads out of the square to the west, is Chelsea, still then partly a working class area, in which Bohemians were starting a process of gentrification that has now utterly transformed the whole borough. Crabtree and Spedan Lewis's building was a hinge between the two worlds, smoothly forming the west side of Sloane Square and gently turning into the King's Road with the subtlest and most welcoming of double curves. The store's curtain wall, one of the first in London, has a strong rhythm emphasized by mullions 4ft (1.2m) apart that give the sides on the square and King's Road a scale that resonates with that of the surrounding Victorian brick buildings.

Very fine though the outside may have been, internally there were many problems. The Crabtree part was the public face of the store, but Peter Jones is in fact an amalgam of several buildings, including the dull Victorian brickwork original store on Symons Street on the north side of the site and A. H. Mackmurdo's house for the artist Mortimer Mempes, a masterpiece of Arts and Crafts urban architecture.

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Floor heights of the different buildings were not easily related, making access and servicing difficult in many parts of the store; there was one loading bay for the whole outfit, where many times the number of products were for sale than in the original building, and pressure of customers (and competition) demanded much more sales space. Yet many elements of the original idealistic building, like squash courts and a theatre for the staff, were redundant (better facilities had been found elsewhere).

John McAslan & Partners were asked to rationalize the whole chaotic complex. They have harmonized floor levels (largely by gutting the dull Symons Street side and relating its floors to those of the steel-framed Crabtree block). A large bulk of new building has been inserted between Crabtree and Symons Street, a move that has allowed creation of the new focus of the complex--a seven-storey high atrium, which adds five floors to Crabtree's original central well. This is now a memorable and luminous space, made more so by the crossing escalators (a la Rogers' Lloyd's) at its west end, where the social drama of shopping is decorously enacted by the well-heeled inhabitants of Chelsea.

The new top floor has a rather grand cafeteria which offers splendid views out over London or down into the well. Detailing is most elegant. Crabtree's very fine original balustrade arrangement has been slightly reworked to provide simple curved glass panels held in place and stiffened by a wide continuous bronze handrail, generous both in width and material. Solar heat gain from the planar glass skylight is modified by fritting the glass, but it will be interesting to see how the space behaves in full summer (I was there on a quite overcast day in mid-May and it was pretty warm). But generally, climate control works well, with chilled beams allowing original floor heights to be retained while holding temperature down. Exhaust air is drawn up the atrium by convection, while fresh air is tempered in small plant units in ceilings on the perimeter. The only place where McAslan's complex knitting process can be detected is in the ceilings, where the original structures inevitably show through.

The whole store, inside and out, has been drawn together and polished up. Use of the site has been rationalized to cater for a completely different kind of retailing from the one that served in the 1930s. In almost every case the building's excellent original details have been retained and enhanced. Sadly, the architects were not commissioned to design the display shelves and cabinets; they come from a standard range used by the John Lewis group--still, they look so flimsy that they cannot last long and will surely be replaced in a few years' time, while the building itself will need no serious alteration for a generation or two. With sympathy and imagination, a well-loved London landmark has been given new life. P.D.

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