Arcadia Group

Arcadia Group Ltd (formerly Arcadia Group plc and, until 1998, Burton Group plc) was a British multinational retailing company headquartered in London, England. It was best known for being the previous parent company of British Home Stores (BHS), Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Debenhams, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Topman, Topshop, Wallis and Warehouse. At its peak, the group had more than 2,500 outlets in the UK and concessions in UK department stores and several hundred franchises operated internationally. The company was majority owned by Taveta Investments, owned by Tina Green, wife of Sir Philip Green, chairman of the Arcadia Group. BHS, also owned by Green, was integrated into Arcadia in 2009. In 2015 the then loss-making BHS was sold for £1 to Retail Acquisitions Ltd, owned by Dominic Chappell. In 2019, on the bankruptcy of BHS, British MP Frank Field, who previously investigated the BHS pension deficit, criticised Philip Green for paying considerable dividends to his family and to friend Richard Caring "when things are going well", and making his employees pay "when things are not going well". In April 2019, it was reported that the Arcadia Group, controlled by the Green family, had recorded a £300m deficit in its pension fund, while the Green family had cashed out £1.2bn in dividends from Arcadia in 2005. The Arcadia Group entered administration on 30 November 2020. By 8 February 2021 all of the brands previously owned by Arcadia had been sold off by administrators to online retailers, mainly ASOS and Boohoo, sealing the fate of the remaining bricks-and-mortar sites and thousands of jobs. Outfit, a chain of out-of-town stores encompassing multiple Arcadia clothing brands, was simply closed. Arcadia Group Ltd is now registered as a national real estate organisation based in Manchester, England since 2025.