The well-known boutiques of Carnaby Street were the hardest-hit, while stores in the city's main shopping areas of Oxford Street and Regent Street were sporadically without power.

The area suffered wider power cuts on Thursday when traders were forced to close after tills, lights and air-conditioning stopped working.

High demand for electricity because of Britain's continuing heatwave helped trigger four unrelated outages over the past few days, EDF Energy said.

The New West End Company, which represents traders in the area, hit out at the French power group.

"Businesses are hugely disappointed," said spokesman Jace Tyrrell.

"Again they have failed to be able to deliver in terms of restoring the power network to the West End. It has caused disruption and confusion for businesses."

EDF said their engineers had been working flat out to resolve the problems.

"EDF Energy Networks appreciates that these customers have experienced problems this week and we sincerely apologise to them for this latest incident," the firm said, adding that it did not foresee power shortages on Saturday.

On Thursday, Oxford Circus Underground train station, one of the busiest on the London network, was closed for an hour-and-a-half and clothing retailer Topshop shut its flagship store three hours early as a result of the outages.

Temperatures in central London hit 29 degrees Celsius (84 degrees Fahrenheit) on Friday but were set to cool over the weekend.

Just over a week ago, an all-time British high for July of 36.5 C (97.7 F) was recorded in southeast England.

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