Feb. 11--Round my way, shops are closing by the day. In the centre of Kingston, on Saturday afternoon, there was strange sport to be had in spotting the ones that had gone since I last paid a visit.

There were plenty of people around, don't get me wrong, but what they weren't doing was buying anything. The pavements and the coffee bars were busy but not the tills. Even in the Bentall Centre it was the same. Except in one store. Mothercare was heaving.

"I know, we're the best-performing retail stock in the last 12 months," says Ben Gordon, the chain's chief executive, when I tell him. In Locanda Locatelli, Gordon is easy to spot: he's the only one in a suit in the restaurant who is smiling.

It's like that with his shops. While others stand empty, his are positively buzzing. He's used to the jokes about people staying in more, but you do have to wonder. Here we are in the middle of a worldwide recession, yet Mothercare has just posted rising sales for the third quarter, taking its growth for the financial year so far to 7.2 percent. Overseas, its stores were up almost 50 percent.

It seems people are carrying on producing babies, regardless of the ills of the world. Around 130 million are born annually, which translates into an industry worth billions. In this country, 90 percent of expectant mothers head to a Mothercare at least once during their pregnancy. As a father of five, I can vouch for just how expensive -- and doubtless, lucrative for Gordon and co -- those trips can be. Later, when we visit his Oxford Street store, I only half-joke with Gordon that I could have had a whole wing named in my honour, or at least that of my credit card.

There is more to Mothercare's success, though, than merely providing baby clothes and nappies and assuming they will come. Two of its main rivals, Adams and Woolworths, have collapsed while Mothercare was powering ahead. And Gordon's company is itself a turn-around: it was losing £24 million a year when he took over in 2002 and was about to breach its banking covenants.

When I say it makes a pleasant change to be meeting someone doing well (and who isn't an insolvency practitioner), Gordon nods and beams. If you didn't know his background you could be forgiven for thinking he's a military man. He's well-turned-out and his manner is slightly clipped -- the result, perhaps, of spending his early years in the expatriate community in the Far East and later attending Epsom College as a boarder.

He was born in 1959, the son of a civil-engineer father. He too studied civil engineering at Bristol University. Gordon worked in Oman and Saudi for Costain.