Jamie Oliver to open cookery school in John Lewis

The TV chef Jamie Oliver is to open a cookery school and café inside John Lewis’s Oxford Street store in London as part of its multimillion-pound makeover plan.
Set to open in March next year, the cookery school will span over 4,600 sq ft and feature two classrooms as well as a 50-seat café. It will offer more than 40 lessons by Oliver’s cookery team.
The collaboration is part of a wider £800 million initiative over four years to improve John Lewis’s in-store experience and win back its status as middle England’s favourite retailer.
The Oxford Street store, along with locations in High Wycombe and Cheadle, are the first to benefit from investment in the John Lewis estate, which has seen upgrades across beauty, homeware, and technology departments.
The store store, which cost £6.5 million to upgrade, now has 41 beauty counters and shop-in-shop concepts, a 24 per cent increase in footprint, and 175 beauty brands — an increase of 15 per cent.
New brands include The Inkey List, Mac, Skin+Me, Nudestix, and The Ordinary. Customers will also be able to access a range of new services across beauty, skincare and haircare.
The refurbishment of the Oxford Street store also includes the addition of a new Waterstones concession, which opened earlier this month as part of John Lewis’s efforts to diversify its offering.
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Peter Ruis, executive director for John Lewis, said: “The buzz is back in John Lewis and we’re giving our customers even more reasons to shop in our brilliant stores. We’re backing ourselves with significant investment to ensure customers get the exceptional quality, outstanding service, and competitive prices they love about our unique brand.”
Ruis rejoined John Lewis earlier this year — after more than a decade running retailers including Jigsaw and Anthropologie — to help turn around the department store chain.
The retailer has struggled amid improved competition from Marks & Spencer, especially online, and the high cost of running its large stores as footfall on high streets has yet to fully recover since the pandemic.
Ruis recently reinstated the company’s “never knowingly undersold” price-match pledge two years after it was abandoned, promising to match prices in its 34 stores and online with 25 competitors including Amazon, Next and M&S.
Pippa Wicks, his predecessor, was responsible for initiatives including replacing John Lewis’s century-old price-matching pledge, which had weighed heavily on profitability, as well as parting ways with the agency responsible for its famous Christmas campaigns for more than a decade. She also launched its low-cost Anyday range.