House of Fraser is developing a new small-store fashion format to help it to expand in town and city centres. The Times.

Don McCarthy, chairman of House of Fraser, who is also a director of its Icelandic owner Baugur, said the group had worked up plans for small stores which would be branded HOF — rather than the full House of Fraser name.

Carthy said: ‘There are certain cities, such as Cambridge, where we don’t think we can have a big store — but we could have a smaller fashion store.’

He said the new HOF stores would be between 40,000 sq ft and 50,000 sq ft, less than half the group’s usual 100,000 sq ft to 120,000 sq ft format.

‘We want to make sure that we don’t just look at cities and towns and think that the only option is one big-size format,’ McCarthy said.

The group now has 61 UK stores and four more in the pipeline - at the White City shopping centre in west London, High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, Belfast and Bristol.