"Hej!"
If this country has a shortage of retail assistants, then that's not evident at Oxford Street's newly assembled IKEA, at least not on opening day, where hundreds of yellow t-shirted, Minion-esque employees — a cartoonish Hej! exclaimed from their back — grin at the deluge of wide-eyed visitors pouring into a building that will soon make them both momentarily happy and altogether exhausted.
This isn't the Swedish retailer's first foray into central London, but the now-defunct IKEA Planning Studio on Tottenham Court Road was small, and this time they're really putting their meatballs on the line. "This is huge..." mutters one guy, who may not have been to a full-sized IKEA before, yet still has a point; this 5,800-square-metre, three-floored lair of flatpackery is like a proper IKEA: a few breakfast bar stools and a fridge of Daim cakes this is not. You can buy a bed here, kitchen units, sofas... the entire contents of your future house might be sourced from within these walls. As if to bolster the idea that IKEA is not pussyfooting about, one of the Hej!s optimistically offers me a supermarket trolley, though most customers have opted to pull the bright yellow baskets along at their heels, like strange plastic pets.
Doors open for a mere few hours, Londoners have already made themselves at home; opening and shutting the doors on wardrobes, cooing over the realism of the plastic pot plants, noshing on value restaurant food beneath a sea of paper globes and having whispered arguments over which lampshade would go better in the bedroom. If IKEA Oxford Street's magic works as intended, it should have its first divorce scalp by the end of the early May bank holiday. The words "So much joy" do float past me, although I'm not sure if that's a fragment of a whole sentence that goes "It would give me so much joy to get out of here". Honestly though, people are loving it.
It's the honeymoon period of course; meatball samples jabbed with mini Swedish flags, and the saxophonist noodling away by the Medtod/Havstorp kitchen cabinet won't always be here. Neither, you'd strongly hope, will the DJ blasting out ear drum-lacerating beats like it's a field in Daresbury at three in the morning.
You sense IKEA has taken a few pages from the 'glory days of Oxford Street Topshop' book; bottles of mineral water are handed out by the entrance (well it is the hottest day of the year), and the store is scattered with wall-sized screens, which look like they should be playing Dua Lipa videos, but actually show what looks like the world's most irritating Zoom call.
The biggest difference with this IKEA though is how it's all slotted together; the infamous labyrinth setup — which flushes you around a particular circuit so you can browse in zombie mode before being burped out at the tills — has been rewired. Like an upgraded video game, there's more scope to roam freely — although this largely means people crashing into one another while daydreaming about what they're going to have at the pub when this has all blown over.
Speaking of which, I wonder if Oxford's Street's IKEA might also cause occasion for a new London hobby — the tipsy IKEA shop. Until now, you mostly needed to drive to IKEA, but will the Night Tube between Oxford Circus and Walthamstow Central now find itself full of inebriated hipsters absent-mindedly stroking fluffy scatter cushions? It's all positive for the economy, anyway.
An IKEA on Oxford Street is just as brilliant and frustrating and yellow and horrible and rather handy and maddening as you'd expect it to be, and it isn't long before you're pining for the fresh, lung cleansing air of the traffic-choked thoroughfare outside. There is, thank goodness, an 'Exit Without Purchase' aisle, although I wonder if I might be the only person ever to use it.
