Department stores have always contained a certain kind of magic.
With their splendour of warm lights flickering in display cabinets, these grand shopping emporiums present themselves like a neatly unpacked toybox or a glossy 1960s magazine you can walk through - taking in the aroma of perfume combined with the bold colours of vintage cigarette packaging lifted from the page.
While so much of a department store is centred on dazzling every sense in every direction, there however remains a hushed secrecy about where some more of this magic might be lurking. Perhaps a hidden compartment within these real life dolls houses, one that only the shop clerks know about and keep to themselves.
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In Liverpool’s iconic Lewis’s department store this was very much the case.
In 2009, just before the lights were about to go out on Lewis’s window displays for good, a photography exhibition revealed the department store’s long lost 5th floor.
Having been restored following heavy bomb damage during the blitz to take its neo-renaissance, palazzo style exterior it still carries today, Lewis’s reopened with its 5th floor a reflection of 50s modernity with dashes of 60s style picked up along the way.
However, come the 1980s, the 5th floor was reduced to a storage unit and was pushed deep into its frayed box and remained out of public view until local photographer Stephen King was granted permission to explore and document its fading glamour in the late noughties.
The photographs find a fossilised 1950s world that rediscovers its energy and style once the heavy layer of dust is blown off.
Emerging into a sleek art deco hallway from the store’s vintage gated elevator, the 5th floor contained joyous reminders of the sharp interior design of its once throbbing cafes and restaurants.
Arguably the centrepiece of the floor was the remains of the 65m tiled ceramic mural designed by Carter’s of Poole which lined the edges of one of the restaurants.
With its expressionist depictions of cutlery and vegetables, it’s as though French modernists Henri Matisse and Fernand Leger were given free licence to colour the restaurant however they saw fit.
Beautiful in its simplicity and playfulness, the mural captured the sense of Lewis's being at the epicentre of post war style and reinvention as Liverpool looked to leave behind the dour years of the war and the economic downturn that followed.
The escapist sentiments of the 5th floor were echoed in what was the largest hair salon in the world at its time.
With bold turquoise walls and orange loungers, the row of metallic hair dryers rubber stamped the floor’s fading notions of glamour and status with many women from across the North West likely to have flocked to experience the full works of the 5th floor of Lewis’s.
With Lewis’s no longer operating the premises and much of the building converted by new developments, these photographs were a whimsical hope that somewhere, quietly tucked away, a surreal portal taking you back to the building’s former glories could still be discovered.
The ECHO has launched a new 8-page nostalgia section in print every Wednesday. You can order a copy here or purchase a copy of the Echo's 64 page Memory Lane special packed with nostalgic photos and articles here.
