Selfridges in the Christmas spirit

Selfridges has unveiled its Christmas windows as the festive sales season arrives in force on the high street.

The department store, which opened its Christmas shop in July, claims to be the first in the world to reveal its street-facing festive decorations.

This year’s theme across the retailer’s London, Birmingham and Manchester stores is Future Fantasy, A Christmas For Modern Times.

The centrepiece in the flagship Oxford Street store is a 42ft 8in high mirrored Christmas tree weighing 1.5 tonnes, which hangs from the atrium and is illuminated by a light show.

Customers in Birmingham can pose for photos inside an 11ft 6in wide snow globe, which blows recyclable white and silver confetti around. In the London store alone, a team has spent more than 500 hours producing the scheme over the past year, while more than 100 people worked non-stop rotating shifts over 10 days to prepare the windows.

The Oxford Street store’s biggest triple-sided window at the corner of Orchard Street features a “magical shipwrecked feast among the waves” along the lines of The Owl And The Pussycat, complete with giant moon and moving boat and oars.

Other windows feature scenes using Rapunzel, Cinderella, the Princess and the Pea, Jack and the Beanstalk and Goldilocks and The Three Bears as inspiration.

The Christmas focus for the retailer comes as it posted another year of record sales, increasing sales by 6% to £1.85 billion for the year to February 2019.