The Queen of Shops on Vesta curries, growing up in a large family – and the pain of losing both her parents as a teenager
Lunch with Mary Portas presents something of a sartorial challenge. You hardly want to turn up for the Queen of Shops wearing a dodgy outfit hauled from the back of the wardrobe; then again, dress too sharply and you might find yourself becoming an unwitting philanthropist. We meet for lunch in the Greenberry Café in London’s Primrose Hill, just a few doors up from one of Portas’s Living & Giving charity shops, which she and Save the Children set up in 2009. There are now 20 of them, and Portas will go along and open new additions to the chain, recalling an occasion when her wife, journalist Melanie Rickey, came too. The couple were having lunch at a nearby cafe afterwards when a woman came up and congratulated Portas on the shop. Alas, Rickey recognised her very own Burberry mac. Portas concedes that she should have asked before donating it – though, she adds, she hadn’t seen her wearing it for ages.
I’m not 100% convinced she’s learned her lesson, given that her daughter Verity recently spotted her Clarks Wallabee shoes in the basement of a branch – though her mother did let her reclaim them and furnished the shop with a replacement. She tells me she spent the previous day doing nothing, although that turns out to be a Portas kind of nothing – listening to opera, making an apple crumble and clearing out a cupboard in the house she shares with Rickey, their son Horatio, nearly four, and, when they’re home from university, her older children, Mylo and Verity. “We have too much stuff in this world!” laughs Portas. I shift my jacket to another chair.
Related: Mary Portas: 'I'm one of the best in the world at retail'
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