Ten years later, the market having failed to appear, most of the ground had to be handed back to Portman. In 1771 they entered into agreement with the landowner Henry Portman for one particularly large site, with a plan involving a market square on the east side of Baker Street. When the district was first laid out in streets, two of the main developers were Abraham Adams, originally a carpenter, and Thomas Elkins, a bricklayer. In their origins, the blitzed buildings were neither a bazaar nor even in Baker Street. The buildings, known until Marks & SpencerвЂ™s departure in 2004 as Michael House, are still there but hardly recognizable following enlargement and remodelling by Make Architects in 2005вЂ“8, as 55 Baker Street. Marks & SpencerвЂ™s were the biggest, and there was space for part to be let at first to another corporation, Metal Box, for its own offices.

This was a time when important sites in Baker Street and elsewhere in this part of the West End were being redeveloped with corporate headquarters. Marks & Spencer moved there in 1957 from scattered offices, including those across the road at 82 Baker Street, where the company had been for many years. In the 1950s it was redeveloped with the head offices of Marks & Spencer, coincidentally the pioneers of Penny Bazaars half a century earlier. Burned out in the Blitz, the Bazaar was demolished in 1941 and its site became an American military car-park. It was a famous place in Victorian times and well into the twentieth century, but the name was going out of use before the Second World War and what now seem to have been the great days of the establishment were by then long over. The Baker Street Bazaar was a group of buildings hidden behind houses and shops on the west side of Baker Street, between Blandford Street and Dorset Street.

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