[1] The historic Daniel Burnham-designed Selfridges flagship store at 400 Oxford Street in London opened on 15 March 1909 and is the second-largest shop in the UK (after Harrods).

The basis of Harry Gordon Selfridge's success was his relentlessly innovative marketing, which was elaborately expressed in his Oxford Street store.

[11] He tried to make shopping a fun adventure and a form of leisure instead of a chore,[12] transforming the department store into a social and cultural landmark that provided women with a public space in which they could be comfortable and legitimately indulge themselves.

[11] Emphasizing the importance of creating a welcoming environment, he placed merchandise on display so customers could examine it, and moved the highly profitable perfume counter front-and-centre on the ground floor.

[15] John Logie Baird made the first public demonstration of moving silhouette images by television from the first floor of Selfridges from 1 to 27 April 1925.

[18] A Milne-Shaw seismograph was set up on the Oxford Street store's third floor in 1932, attached to one of the building's main stanchions, where it remained unaffected by traffic or shoppers.

[19] The huge SIGSALY scrambling apparatus, by which transatlantic conferences between American and British officials (most notably Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt) were secured against eavesdropping, was housed in the basement from 1943 on, with extension to the Cabinet War Rooms about a mile away.

Weston, a retailing expert who is the owner of Loblaw Companies in Canada, chose to invest in the renovation of the Oxford Street store—rather than to create new stores in British cities other than Manchester and Birmingham.

[29] In July 2011, Truvia created an emerald green boating lake (with a waterfall, a boat-up cocktail bar and a forest of Stevia plants).

[31] In August 2020, during a difficult time for UK retail, Selfridges offered luxury pieces for hire to millennial and socially conscious clients.

The first phase consisted of only the nine-and-a-half bays closest to the Duke Street corner,[40] and is an example of one of the earliest uses of steel cage frame construction for this type of building in London.

This circumstance, according to the report of a contemporary London correspondent from the Chicago Tribune, was largely responsible for making possible the eventual widespread use of Chicago’s steel frame cage construction system in the United Kingdom: “Under the pressure of [Mr. Selfridge] and the interests allied with him, the councilors admitted the soundness of American building methods and framed a bill which will be pressed at once in parliament [sic] to permit these methods to be used here.”[41]Also involved in the design of the store were American architect Francis Swales, who worked on decorative details, and British architects R. Frank Atkinson and Thomas Smith Tait.

[45] The Birmingham store, designed by architects Future Systems, is covered in 15,000 spun aluminium discs on a background of Yves Klein Blue.

[50][51] Since 2002, the windows have been photographed by London photographer Andrew Meredith and published in magazines such as Vogue, Dwell, Icon, Frame, Creative Review, Hungarian Stylus Magazine, Design Week, Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times, WGSN as well as many worldwide media outlets, including the world wide press, journals, blogs and published books.

[11] The opening week ad campaign relied mainly on unpaid promotions in the form of news articles in newspapers, magazines, and journals.

From the store's soft lighting to the general absence of price tags to live music from string quartets, every detail of the opening was purposeful to draw people into the entire shopping experience and make each shopper feel unique.

[65] [66][66] Selfridges was also featured in the 2017 movie Wonder Woman as the shop where Steve Trevor takes Diana Prince to give her a more contemporary appearance to blend in.