Lonely this Christmas: Jenners in Edinburgh. The building’s owner has plans to turn it into a hotel

Jenners department store on Edinburgh’s Princes Street has been a constant in Tracey Wallace’s life. As a child, she would join her parents on a Christmas pilgrimage to admire the festive lights in the windows. When she became a parent, Wallace could not visit Princes Street without treating her children to a trip round the toy department of the shop known as the “Harrods of the north”.

Future generations of the Wallace family will not be indulged in the same way. The owner of the building, the Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, plans to turn the 180-year-old shop into a hotel with a rooftop bar and restaurants.

For centuries department stores offered shoppers unrivalled choice, but over the past decade they have been eviscerated by