“There’s 30 years of display stuff – point-of-sale and Christmas decorations – incorporated with all this amazing 50s and 70s design.

“The project needed to be reigned in in some way – I could have been up there forever taking photographs. So that’s why I decided to bring the employees back.”

King worked with arts project management company Urban Spoon to track down and interview people who had worked on the fifth floor and who, he soon discovered, had very fond memories.

“Quite a few of the ladies from the hair salon still meet up once a month. Once we found one person they would say ‘oh, I’m still in contact with this person’ or ‘I still see this person at the shops’,” he says.

“It was quite shocking for them to go back there. Quite a lot of people, even if they still worked there, had not been up there for 20 years.

“There were people who’d worked in the silver service restaurant and found it’s now filled with pink Christmas trees.”

While the images capturing the entire rooms are fascinating, its the tiny details that really capture the imagination – an individual bonnet hair dryer against brown floral wallpaper, a newspaper cutting of Charles’ and Diana’s wedding.

“It was the little details that made the project make sense – either architecturally or if there was a story someone had told me about I tried to incorporate it,” says King, who grew up in Wirral but now lives in Liverpool.

“Nothing was set up in the photos. There were a few things where I thought I want to take a picture of that but there’s a lot of junk around it so I’d move some of it out of the way.

“Some parts of the cafeteria is exactly how it would have been.

“On those photos, I’d clean up to make it look as it had been. I’d be sweeping up because there was a lot of dust. Then on some of them I’d leave it to show the difference between now and how it once looked.”

Will the floor always remain this way – trapped in time? Or will Lewis’s management one day decide to redevelop the space?

Whatever happens in the future, the fifth floor will always been there – in the memories of those who were proud to say they worked there and captured in King’s stunning images.

LEWIS’S 5th Floor: A Department Story is at the Conservation Centre from Feb 26 to Aug 30. The accompanying hardback book is priced £19.99.