The world turns. And it turns. And it moves and you don't. You're still here.” Those lines from Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, now enjoying a sell-out revival in London’s West End, resonate with new meaning in the summer of 2022. The seismic shock of the pandemic has rolled into a state of perma-crisis. The world turns and it turns, and yet - thank heavens - we are still here, working hard, determined to rise phoenix-like from the ashes, to build on what went before, but create something even more compelling. It's exactly this resilience, reinvention and rebirth of the luxury sector that we wish to reflect and inspire with the contents of the Walpole Book of British Luxury 22/23.
Britain’s cultural and creative eco-system has had a tough couple of years: the impact of successive lockdowns on theatres, galleries and museums, on high-end hospitality and retail and the absence of international visitors has taken a particularly heavy toll, but it is exactly these organisations and businesses which will help us speed into recovery. In truth, they’re already doing so - the charge began with luxury goods: even before the end of 2021, according to figures released by Bain & Company at Walpole’s annual British Luxury Summit earlier this year, they were already powering ahead of 2019, luxury’s high water mark, with, as Lucia van der Post puts it in ‘The Resilience of Quality’, customers “latching onto quality in every area of their lives…determined to live life to the full”. Everywhere you look, there’s a renaissance of creativity from brands, renewed resolve to create something exceptional, imaginative and unforgettable for these customers: it seems that crisis can be the grit in the oyster that results in the most magnificent of pearls because, as Farrah Storr writes in ‘Is Britannia Cool?’, “creative talent does not die in times of hardship. It only gets fiercer….When the challenge is real, that’s when true flights of creative fancy lift off.”
Domestic demand can only drive the recovery so far, joyful and enthusiastic as it is. The critically important opportunity to rebuild the post pandemic economy and support future prosperity for the UK comes from reigniting Great Britain’s appeal for affluent, discerning international visitors, particularly those from the US and the Middle East. According to Walpole’s report, 'What It’s Worth: Enabling the Return of the £30bn High-End Tourism Sector’, the kind of high-end tourism Walpole members attract, as distinct from mass tourism, is worth a cool £30b to the UK. Pre-pandemic we had the highest high-end visitor spend in Europe - more than £1,600 per person per day. Not only that, more than half that expenditure is on culture, shopping and entertainment and if we can attract high-spending internationals back to the UK, our badly affected museums, galleries and theatres will rebound more quickly and more jobs can be created for UK residents, contributing much needed cash to the Exchequer.
Happily, we have some unique advantages as a country when it comes to attracting those all important international luxury visitors. Walpole members - the UK’s exceptional hotels, restaurants, high-end shops and cultural institutions - play a crucial part. As Talib Choudhry notes in ‘As Others See Us’, “something picked up on a jaunt down Bond Street also boasts bragging rights; a casually uttered, “Oh, I got it from London,” confers an air of international sophistication.” It’s about the complete package a trip to the UK offers, says Mark Ellwood in ‘A Love Letter to British Luxury’: “For America,” he writes, “British luxury sets the benchmark…luxury in the UK isn’t just about the product per se, but also about the experiences surrounding it. After a long period of disconnection and disjointed life around the world, experiences like that are more prized than ever, a chance to buy in as much as to buy.”.
It’s not only our excitingly diverse and dynamic cities that draw high-end visitors here from abroad. The particular beauty of the British countryside with its historic houses set in Capability Brown pleasure gardens, our rugged national parks with their lakes and hills, our wild, ancient places like Salisbury Plain’s Stonehenge or The Hebrides, our coastline, our pleasant pastures and clouded hills sing their siren song too. We also have one of the best-known and most varied annual calendars with destination moments set throughout the year, whether Cheltenham, Wimbledon or Goodwood, the Chelsea Flower Show or Frieze, Glastonbury or Glyndebourne. “We must never underestimate the influence of our cultural institutions”, writes Sarah Sands in ‘Soft Power and Pageants’ in a year which celebrates some important anniversaries, not least the centenary of the BBC, and where the shiniest possible highlight in our national calendar, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, will have drawn the eyes of the whole world towards Great Britain: “the scenes on The Mall on 5th June will be an armistice day for the culture wars.” Unquestionably, Her Majesty is the ultimate beacon of soft power. As the most famous woman in the world, she calmly radiates quiet power as well as the virtues of duty, service and stability; a symbol of strength no matter how much the world might turn. She is also, suggests Kev Chesters in ‘Be More Queen’, “...the best example we have of a British luxury brand…The key to success? An authentic tone of voice”
“Creativity is Britain’s superpower” says Walpole Chairman and Managing Director of Harrods, Michael Ward. Our film and television productions and our peerless acting, writing and directing talents are global emissaries for Britain’s soft power - particularly potent when the only window on the world has been our screens. This year, one of our finest cinematic exports, James Bond, celebrates its sixtieth anniversary and as Alex Bilmes proposes in ‘Licence to Sell’, “Along with a handful of others (The Beatles, the BBC, Burberry) Bond has, for 60 years, sold Britain to the world. For all the blunt instrumentation, his greatest power is soft, and the Britain that Bond flogs is upmarket, expensive and refined. Bond has long been, and remains, our luxury industry’s most muscular pitchman, the model, literally and figuratively, for a certain kind of high-spending sophistication…He is our not-so-secret weapon…”
Perhaps the secret of 007’s enduring success - not to mention his not so secret services to British luxury - is that he cleverly evolves to meet the zeitgeist without ever losing sight of what built his appeal. In this, as Nick Carvell notes in ‘Trendy Tradition’, he has a lot in common with all British luxury brands, “long-standing, storied makers known for their intrinsic values of quality and craftsmanship” yet for whom age is far from a barrier to that all-important connection with a younger consumer, but “an advantage”. The answer lies, he argues, in the spirit of the founder, quoting Mark Weston, dunhill’s Creative Director, who says, “Alfred Dunhill was about change, innovation, and experimentation, more than anything else, he was always looking ahead”, and it’s this time-travelling ability to always be looking towards the future at the same time as cherishing a storied past that gives British luxury - and our entire cultural and creative eco-system - its edge.
Sometimes, as Will Hersey reminds us in ‘Bright Sparks’, there can even be an eerily prophetic quality to luxury. When examining how legendary motor car manufacturers like Rolls Royce and Bentley are powering away from the internal combustion engine in this age of sustainability, he quotes Charles Rolls who, a few years before co-founding Britain’s defining luxury brand Rolls Royce, had seen an early example of an electric car, noting “they should become very useful when fixed charging stations can be arranged”. One hundred and twenty-two years on, that kind of prescience sends shivers down one’s spine.
Looking forwards, Tom Standage’s ‘Predictable Unpredictability’ offers a word to the wise, writing, “there will be no going back to normal…the rest of the 2020s are more likely to look like 2021 or 2022 than they are like 2018 or 19”, a view shared by astrologer Neil Spencer in 'The Age of Uncertainty'. But no matter how different or disrupted the backdrop, when we’re trying to rebuild we have to “focus on looking for the opportunities that change always presents”, as Standage says. For reasons of amour propre as well as the necessity of super-charging an economic recovery, there can be no post-pandemic convalescence, only going forward, full throttle.
The lessons of the past show us that British luxury is an innately resilient beast, never shy of turning adversity into opportunity. As you read this, the historic occasion of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee will, like the London Olympics ten years before, with its potent reminder of our creativity and our cultural treasures, not to mention the power of our extraordinary brands, have shot its arrows of desire into every corner of the world, laying a trail of breadcrumbs for high-end international visitors, bringing that £30b back to these shores. And perhaps, as Sarah Sands suggests, “as we see the potency of the British brand on the world stage, creative and freedom loving, this is the season in which we can also learn to celebrate ourselves”.
