In stately St James’s, south of London’s Piccadilly, you can find indulgent arrays of bespoke suits, silk ties and elegant men’s socks laid out on polished wooden tables. But not, until now, has there been gender-uncertain menswear in wooden booths, or nestling in a barely lit basement area of a building originally created in 1911 for Burberry.

 

“Beautiful chaos” is how Adrian Joffe, President of Dover Street Market, described the edgy, multi-brand store he moved from Mayfair to the Haymarket this week, just south of Piccadilly Circus, a street better known for tourist cafés and ice-cream parlours than any other kind of cool.

“It’s basically a mix – I wanted to give small spaces to young designers, a bigger Rose Bakery, a much bigger basement,” said Joffe, known for his exceptional retail eye as well as for being the partner of Rei Kawakubo, whose various Comme des Garçons lines are placed on display in the newly refurbished building. In fact, she has come over from Tokyo to supervise this with him.

But anyone who thinks this new market will be in the vein of other stores in the posh, polite and slightly stuffy St James’s enclave has missed the point. Stealthily, over the past decade, a careful reassessment of the area has been carried out by the Crown Estate, the corporate body that governs the lands and holdings belonging to, but not run by, the British monarchy.

Opposite Dover Street Market is the soon-to-be opened St James’s Market, which will offer retail variety, and opportunities to sit and eat in a traffic-free zone. And all around are plans to brush up the historical areas, like London’s very first arcade, a narrow covered alley which could one day become as glamorous as the bustling Burlington Arcade in Piccadilly.

While DSM, held in awe across the fashion world, will open on Friday, with eclectic new mini-shops for names such as JW Anderson, Azzedine Alaïa, Thom Browne, Molly Goddard, Rick Owens and Raf Simons, the Crown Estate is following its own carefully developed plans.

Anthea Harries, the St James’s Portfolio Manager for the Crown Estate, with its new designer stores on Bond Street, from Burberry to the Polo Ralph Lauren set to open this year, explained to me that the plans to regenerate St James’s were finalised three years ago and are deliberately different from other regenerated areas.

“It’s more subtle – because of both the architecture and the strategy we have towards the retail people we want to attract to St James’s,” she explained. “Who was here historically? Well, you’ve got John Lobb, Lock & Co.  and Turnbull & Asser – they have been here for a very, very long time, sometimes a five-generational family retail business. How do we move that forward for future generations, and to a younger audience that is working and living in St James’s? The average age now is about 36, with 70 per cent male and 30 per cent female.”

Milliner Stephen Jones, putting the finishing touches to his DSM display, was dismissive of the area as it now stands.

“This is the nowhere land of central London,” he said. “But then so was Dover Street originally and now it has Acne and Victoria Beckham.”

 

 

Almost everything Anthea Harries said about the area surprised me. I had always thought of St James’s as a remnant of an older London, predicated on privilege and class. But she explained that the area was not just ancient buildings like the royal residence, Clarence House, but also the post-war New Zealand House and The Economist Tower, which Anthea dubbed “marmite” buildings. You could probably say the same about the monumental White Cube modern art gallery in Mason’s Yard off Duke Street.

Anthea also said that three quarters of a million square feet in the area is retail – although I could think only of the posh men’s stores in Jermyn Street and the antique book shops near Christie’s auction house.

By contrast, the Rose Bakery at DSM – a much larger version than the shabby-chic cafe originally in Dover Street – is Joffe’s kind of simple eatery.

Harries admitted that the arrival of this DSM store had been a complete surprise, although a happy coincidence for the Crown Estate. Joffe said that he was obliged to move DSM (which also has a large store in an untapped part of New York’s Manhattan) because the rent in its original 10-year home in Dover Street had tripled.

“What made me confident about taking this building down to Piccadilly, which was never known to be a retail area, was that I’d heard about the Crown Estate’s development of St James’s Market,” said Joffe. “It helped me have a little more confidence – although it didn’t make me decide.”

Creating new areas for fashionable retailing is a globally tried-and-tested method. But the Crown Estate does not have such a clear-cut route as, for example, its own remake of the traditional Regent’s Street or the Grosvenor Estate, when it refurbished Mount Street in Mayfair.

“From a retail perspective, we’ve got a really interesting challenge here, because unlike Regent’s Street, which is one thoroughfare with flagship global stores, we have a number of different streets with different characteristics,” said Harries. “Jermyn Street is probably the best example of a street which has history and heritage and is renowned for being focussed on menswear – but its customers are 70 per cent tourists and it has perhaps lost its way trying to move forward for future generations.”

“What we’re doing through our regeneration pipeline is the refurbishment of buildings, the redevelopment of buildings where appropriate – and creating new retail spaces that vary from 500ft² to 10,000ft². We’re working really hard to make sure we get the right quality of brands. Anyone coming into the area has to be personal, distinctive, stimulating and eclectic. We call it redefining the refined.”

Original fashion retailers are hard to find. But this unlikely marriage of refurbished class and DSM’s imaginative retailing may be just what St James’s needs to bring this slumbering area of the British city to vibrant life.