Lighting Trends: Big and Bold

MARKS & SPENCER, ON a roll as far as revenues and profits are concerned, opened its largest store of 2025 this past November, embodying almost everything that has put the outfit in its current enviable position.

Located in central Bristol’s Cabot Circus mall, this is a £21 million (roughly $28.4 million USD), three floor, 80,000-square-foot store that takes the place of former department store House of Fraser which closed in mid-2024. Externally, the store has something of the former tenant, but within it has been completely remodelled.

Marks & Spencer opened its largest store of the past year in Bristol’s Cabot Circus mall.

Practically, this means a food hall and a 200-seater café on the lower floor (given Cabot Circus’ geography, it is hard to state whether this is a basement or ground floor level). It is worth noting that the floor feels like a standalone shop and many will probably use it in this manner. Taking the escalator up, the shopper arrives in womenswear with semi-discrete home and beauty shops, complete with designated fitouts; and menswear, which has its own in-mall entrance, occupies the top floor.

When it comes to lighting the store, M&S is keeping pace with the mall as a whole, rated BREEAM “Excellent” when it first opened in 2008, meaning it uses the standard M&S LED spec, which has been in place for more than a decade. Andy Krimatt-Car, until recently the retailer’s Head of Sustainability (he has now changed roles at the company), says: “LED lighting has been our standard spec for more than a decade. We’ve actually spent the last three years retrofitting the estate with LEDs.”

For M&S, low(er) energy lighting is a given and, when it comes to sustainability, much of what is in place was kick-started by the retailer’s “Plan A because there is no Plan B” strategy that dates back to 2007.

THIS PAGE: The latest store’s mall host holds a BREEAM Excellent rating.

Across Europe and North America, brands are accelerating estate-wide LED retrofits, aligning with green building certifications and integrating energy efficient specs into new prototypes rather than treating sustainability as an add-on. What was once a differentiator is now baseline: low-energy lighting, carbon-conscious material choices and measurable environmental targets are becoming standard practice.

Marks & Spencer quit Bristol city centre in 2022, relying instead on a large northern edge-of-city store in Cribbs Causeway. The Cabot Circus store means it is back with a (bright) bang and the city is the better for it.

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PHOTOS: MARKS & SPENCER

John Ryan

John Ryan is a journalist covering the retail sector, a role he has fulfilled for more than a decade. As well as being the European Editor of VMSD magazine, he writes for a broad range of publications in the U.K., the U.S. and Germany with a focus on in-store marketing, display and layout, as well as the business of store architecture and design. In a previous life, he was a buyer for C&A, based in London and then Düsseldorf, Germany. He lives and works in London.