John Lewis to re-open at Milton Keynes shopping centre on Thursday

The move follows the successful reopening of 13 shops elsewhere in the country last week.

But close-contact beauty services will not be offered and the restaurant and fitting rooms will remain closed until further notice.h

However, customers will still be able to try out prams, furniture and tech products and try on wipeable items such as sunglasses.

Bérangère Michel, executive director for customer service at the John Lewis Partnership said; “The overwhelmingly positive feedback from both customers and Partners on our first 13 department store reopenings has given us confidence to open in more locations across the UK."

She added: “We are still reopening our shops carefully and in phases to ensure that our safety measures are absolutely right, and remain prepared to stop and review our plans if need be.

“We are already applying lessons learned from our first store openings earlier this week. We’ve learned how crucial our newly created host roles - which help customers adapt to the new social distancing measures and new ways of shopping - are in ensuring customers have an enjoyable experience.

“We found that in some shops we were able to increase the number of customers and still maintain robust social distancing, and made our signage clearer in order to help customers navigate the changes.

“Although we are not able to offer every single experience that we used to, we are still managing to offer customers a really varied shopping experience that is as close to normal and as enjoyable as we can possibly make it. Customers will still be able to touch products, lie on beds, try on and test wipeable products such as sunglasses, prams, and tech products, and get the personal advice they expect from our Partners.”

Key social distancing measures in John Lewis shops include “Customer Service Hosts”, who are assigned to welcome customers into the store and answer any questions while managing customer numbers, queues both at entrances and busy areas of the shop.

There will be a reduction in the number of shop entrances and exits, caps on the number of customers entering stores, social distancing signage, protective screens at checkouts, and control procedures for escalators and lifts limiting the number of users.