The UK’s ‘Queen of Shops’, Mary Portas talks to Melissa Blease about grief, growth and why the future of shopping is about far more than simply buying ‘stuff’. Image: Linda Nylind
Since way before her first TV series aired on BBC2 in 1997, Mary Portas has enjoyed top-ranking status as the UK’s indisputable Queen of Shops. The go-to authority on all topics retail-related… and a British style icon.
She’s responsible for turning Harvey Nichols into the global fashion destination that it is today. She founded her own retail consultancy venture Yellowdoor in 1997, rebranding it as transformative creative communications agency Portas in 2013. She’s advised the government on the future of high streets across the UK, created 26 Living & Giving shops for Save the Children, presented or starred in multiple TV series and documentaries focusing on retail, consumer habits and social change – and somehow, she found the time to write several bestselling books along the way.
Portas will be discussing her most recent memoir I Shop, Therefore I Am – described by publisher Canongate Books as “a no-holds-barred account about her time at Harvey Nichols, full of juicy anecdotes from the fashion world and ‘90s nostalgia” – at the Guildhall Bath on Friday 22 May – part of the Bath Literature Festival. But there’s something about Mary that obliges me to make a confession at the very start of our chat: shopping is not, for me, a sport, a pastime or a hobby.
I expected her to attempt to convince me that I’m missing out on one of the most fulfilling recreational diversions that modern life has to offer. However…
“Oh, I’m with you on that!” she proclaims. “Shopping for the sake of shopping doesn’t interest me at all – it’s just not my thing. I kind of fell into retail with no previous fascination for that world, and what I do today has grown organically through years of being in the industry and specialising in certain areas of it.”
Okay, so I may not have known that Mary wasn’t a pro-shopper. But like many people, I feel as though I ‘know’ her; I’ve read her books and followed the career arc that’s led her to become one of the UK’s most high-profile, innovative businesswomen – and I know that she’s no stranger to challenges, not least of all in her early years.
“When I was young, I wanted to be an actress,” she recalls. “I got into RADA, but my mother died during that period and I wanted to stay put and look after my younger brother. Two years later, my father died. I was in a lot of grief and pain but my sister pointed out that I had to do something, so I signed up for a course in Visual Merchandising and Store Designing at my local art college in Watford. I had no original passion for the topic at all; to me, the very notion of being told that you have to have a passion can, in itself, be too daunting.”
But Mary has never succumbed to daunt. “When you lose your parents and your family home at a young age you have nowhere to go; there’s no going home on a Sunday, no one caring for you – it just doesn’t happen,” she says. “It’s a really, really lonely place, and maybe I made a lot of mistakes during those times in order to survive. But through those mistakes I grew, and created stability for myself.”
Mary went on to create loving, supportive stability for her own three children [today aged 15, 28 and 30] too. But she’s keen to acknowledge how times have changed since she found her own way through her difficult early years. “After my mum died, I went back to school and all I got in terms of support was the headmistress saying she was so sorry for my loss; no therapy, no help, was offered. When my father died and I lived in our family home for months afterwards, there was nobody there for us. Thank God that times have changed! Today we live in a society with such great social infrastructures.
Shopping for the sake of shopping doesn’t interest me at all –it’s just not my thing
Mary has witnessed – and affected – positive changes in other key areas of society too; themes around what it means (and, perhaps, how?) to be a woman finding her place in today’s world being a key element in everything she does. Are we any closer to a progressive society than we were when she started forging her own path in the world of business?
“Undoubtedly!”, she proclaims. “I was discussing this with my youngest son just yesterday. He sees me as a businesswoman who brought him and his siblings up and paid for everything, so he can’t understand the notion of inequality. I gave him a short, sharp lesson on how far women have come; I told him that his grandmother couldn’t even sign a cheque up until 1974. Instead of us leaning into the patriarchy we need to create our own world, and the only way that we’re going to get out of the terrible way the world has been painted by angry men who are still holding onto those old structures of power and destruction is to bring the feminine energy that we lost those millennia ago back into force. I don’t want to play by their rules anymore; I want our way of being, that’s at the heart of society.”
So too, I guess, is shopping?
“Yes, but the digital world has rewired everything we do,” says Mary. “I think the reason why everybody is so obsessed with the 1990s at the moment is because that was the last decade of the pre-internet era. Today, people are obsessed with how cheaply – and how quickly – we can buy ‘stuff’. But we’re changing again. We know that Mother Earth is hurting – anybody who doesn’t acknowledge that is in serious trouble. And we’re looking at how much we spend and saying to ourselves, do I really need this? The biggest and fastest growing market within the younger generation is recycling and upcycling, which is extraordinary. And we’re seeing new types of retail develop: independent shops and markets where everybody makes connections, collaboratives creating new kinds of spaces, and variations on business models coming up. When I published The Portas Review in 2011, not one of the political parties talked about the high street; today, every single party has it on their agenda.”
Thirteen years after The Portas Review was published, Mary was awarded an OBE 2024 for Services to Business, Broadcasting and Charity. “That was a beautiful moment: me and my three kids turning up at Windsor Castle to be honoured for the work that I’ve done,” she says; “I looked back on myself, the scrappy kid who came from very little, and thought, well that turned out okay didn’t it?”
Indeed it did – and so did our chat. From our shared star sign (“Some of the worst people in the world are Geminis! – Trump! You can see the mad Gemini mind that hasn’t been controlled right there!”) to how much she enjoys dividing her time between homes in the Cotswolds and London by way of her revealing that she’s not a “very chilly-out person” who can’t think of anything worse than watching TV in the middle of the day (no surprise there!), our conversation flowed faster than an Alexander McQueen frock moves from the rails of a high street charity shop.
But before we say goodbye: how would Mary Portas describe herself in just three words?
“That’s tough!” she laughs. “I would say driven, but that’s not quite right. I’ve always got the next idea of what I want to do and that’s really quite central to the way I live, but I don’t know what the word would be for that? I really believe in change and have never been fearful of it, maybe because I’ve lost so much I always believe I can get back up and I won’t compromise on that. And I have a fundamental belief that humanity, at the core, is really good and we have to make the best of it; I want to use every power I have to do that. I use hope as a muscle, and I refuse to believe that we have to accept the way the world is today. How do I use the power that I’ve got? That’s what drives me.”
All hail Queen Mary: a majestic woman indeed.
Mary Portas will talk about her life and career as well as introduce her new book: I Shop, Therefore I Am at The Guildhall on Friday 22 May as part of the Bath Literature Festival 2026.
For further information and tickets, visit: bathboxoffice.org.uk
