Marks & Spencer has unveiled a lavish revamp of its flagship Pantheon store on London's Oxford Street, presenting it as the template for modernising over 200 large stores as part of a £700m growth strategy. Chief executive Stuart Machin, who has led M&S for four years, is pushing an ambitious turnaround following a difficult year in which a cyber-attack shut down online trading for almost seven weeks and cost more than £300m in profit, calling the year ahead "one of the most important" in the retailer's history.

The 88-year-old Pantheon store, originally an 18th-century opera house before its 1930s reconstruction for M&S, has now completed its makeover, with attention turning to the Marble Arch store at the other end of Oxford Street, which will be demolished next year despite environmental concerns. The new 10-storey Marble Arch building, approved after a legal challenge and sign-off by housing secretary Angela Rayner in 2024, will have just two and a half floors of retail space compared with five currently, alongside offices and a gym, with the four-year rebuild requiring a temporary store nearby. Machin's turnaround attempt follows several failed revival efforts by predecessors, with M&S having only briefly regained £1bn annual pre-tax profits in 2008 after first hitting that mark in 1998, as it continues to face competition from Primark, H&M, Zara and online rivals.