Philip Green

Philip Green was born in Croydon in 1952 into a Jewish family and was sent at nine to Carmel College, the Jewish boarding school in Oxfordshire. He left school at fifteen, worked in shoe importing, and from the 1990s assembled the Arcadia Group — Topshop, Topman, Dorothy Perkins, Burton, Miss Selfridge — which became Britain's largest privately owned clothing retailer and made Topshop an international brand before the group collapsed in 2020.