Festival Place to see H&M's first UK store with new look and feel for the brand

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Feb 22, 2021

H&M will open its first new-look store in the UK at Basingstoke’s Festival Place in early summer, with the mall saying the giant shop will “offer a very different interior look and feel to other H&M stores, with a focus on modern and relevant shopping experiences”. No details of the exact plan for the store are available yet.

The opening won’t be in a new space as the Swedish chain already has a megastore there. But it has renewed its lease at the 1.1 million sq ft retail and leisure destination that has enjoyed a succession of such renewals in recent periods.

As mentioned, the store (currently closed due to the UK lockdown) will be given a complete makeover.

H&M’s local country manager Toni Galli said: “We are extremely excited to be reopening our H&M Basingstoke store in Festival Place with a first-of-its-kind new look-and-feel this summer. Our aim is always to provide our customers with the best shopping experience possible and we are confident that our Basingstoke store will offer exactly this.”

Festival Place first opened in October 2002 and H&M opened there the following year. The mall is one of the top shopping destinations in Britain with a ranking in the top 20 of GlobalData’s UK shopping centres report. It was acquired by AEW in December 2015 with a vision to “transform, modernise and create a vastly improved shopping offer and environment for customers”.