Everyone has their own Oxford Street. Perhaps it used to be the Virgin Megastore and the way down to Soho Square. Maybe it’s now Uniqlo and up to Broadcasting House. Or it might always have been John Lewis and Selfridges. Londoners view Oxford Street with a mixture of horror and pride, and have done so for centuries. But for some — even as the promise of Crossrail improves the traditionally tattier eastern end of the street — the horror is now overwhelming.



Commercial rents hit a record £1,000 per sq ft this year, pricing out many retailers. And Oxford Street is one of the world’s most polluted streets, even though almost all its traffic is made up of buses and taxis. The half-a-million daily visitors are taking their lungs in their hands, and even their lives – three of its pedestrian crossings number among the 10 most dangerous in the country, according to the Department of Transport.



And so the movement to pedestrianise the whole thing appears, finally, to be gaining ground. All of London’s mayoral candidates now support pedestrianisation – but is it ever actually going to happen?



“I first wrote about this in around 1998 in the Evening Standard,” says the transport writer and author Christian Wolmar. “I think it will inevitably happen. People say, ‘Oh, it’s all too difficult, there are too many buses; the taxis will get angry about it; it’s impossible.’ But the new approach should be to say: ‘This has got to happen, so how do we progress it?’”

A pedestrianisation scheme was a central plank of Wolmar’s own, unsuccessful campaign to be Labour’s candidate for London mayor. Is he annoyed that the official candidates have all now jumped on his omnibus? Not at all. “I’m delighted about that!” he says. “Oxford Street is not fit for purpose in all sorts of ways.”

Pedestrianisation certainly appears to be good for business: when Oxford Street experimented with pedestrian-only VIP days in recent years, footfall doubled. “They had a million people on one day,” Wolmar says. “They took more money than on any day before or since.”

Future London? A view of how a pedestrianised Oxford Street could look. Illustration: Urban Graphics

But where, exactly, would you put all the buses that currently bustle their way up and down this iconic street? “That is the big issue; the buses would have to be reorganised in one go” – which, Wolmar says, is not such a bad idea. After all, the London bus network contains “great historic routes, some of which haven’t been altered since the horse and carriage”. It would take a lot of work, “but none of it is unfeasible, none of it is impossible. It’s a political decision.”



In deciding what kind of place people want Oxford Street to become, it helps to consider what kind of place it used to be. An historical view does, at least, put the irritations of West End shopping in perspective: had you been travelling west through what is now Oxford Street four centuries ago, you wouldn’t have been going shopping; you might well have been sitting in a cart on your way to be hanged.

Nobody could say that Oxford Street as presently constituted is anything but an urban nightmare Christian Wolmar

In Shakespeare’s time, what is now Oxford Street was not even part of London, which was then a far smaller conurbation. (The church of St Giles in the Fields, for example, stood in a field at the end of Howlburne, which marked the westernmost point of the liberty of the city.) The street, then called Tyburn Road, led to the village of Tyburn, which provided water for the city and was also the site of the notorious “Tyburn Tree” – the gallows. Condemned prisoners would be driven through the city from Holborn to Tyburn Road with crowds throwing eggs at them, before being executed roughly where Marble Arch stands today.

It was at Tyburn that Elizabeth Barton, the nun who prophesied that Henry VIII would die within six months if he married Anne Boleyn, was executed in 1534. Tyburn was a deathly presence in the literature of the time.: in Ben Jonson’s play The New Inn, the host remarks darkly that if a man applies himself to the arts of paganism, “He may, perhaps, take a degree at Tyburn.” In 1668, Samuel Pepys records going with a friend to Tyburn to watch an execution, and being disappointed that he had “come too late, it being done; two men and a woman hanged”.

The execution of Laurence Shirley Ferrers at Tyburn in 1760. Illustration: Hulton Archive/Getty

Today’s Oxford Street was once the main Roman road leading westwards out of London (the via Trinovantica), and was indeed the way to Oxford – but that isn’t why it’s called Oxford Street now. Up until the early 18th century, Tyburn Road still marked the northernmost edge of London, with open fields to the north leading towards the village of Mary le Bone. These fields belonged to Edward Harley, the earl of Oxford, and it was for him the street was renamed in 1739 (he also gave his name to nearby Harley Street for good measure).

In the same year, the Scottish merchant and historian William Maitland published a beautiful History of London whose large, leather-bound volumes one may still consult in the British Library. Maitland records that the length of the street had been “beautifully paved” in the 1730s, and within a few decades the surroundings were growing: a 1775 map shows the area built up to the north as far as Cavendish Square. By 1815, the Encyclopedia Londinensis recorded that: “The magnificent squares and streets north of Oxford-street are so numerous and extensive, that they form the largest portion of the fashionable part of the town.”

Unfortunately, to get there you had to cross Oxford Street, which was still a “fashionable objection” to getting to the nice houses. And so it was proposed that “a circus should be formed” to connect Oxford Street with a new street running down to Piccadilly – today’s Regent Street. As we know, crossing Oxford Street did not become a simple and elegant matter, especially once the footfall at the Circus reached today’s 80 million or so a year. Hence the exciting new diagonal crossings at Oxford Circus, installed in 2009, that confuse the hell out of tourists to this day.

But Oxford Street was hardly, even in the 19th century, a playground for the smart set; rather it was a hubbub of traders, shoppers and vagrants. If it hadn’t been, it wouldn’t have inspired some masterpieces of literature. It was here, on a rainy Sunday, that Thomas de Quincey first bought opium from “the beatific vision of an immortal druggist, sent down to earth on a special mission to myself”. And so his immortal book, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, was set in train.

The first John Lewis shop, on Oxford Street, opened in 1864. Photograph: John Lewis/PA

Other authors were more inclined to simple celebration of this street on the edge of the city. An Ode to Oxford Street, published in the Pocket Magazine of March 1825 by one GJ de Wilde, praises the street’s “poetic shops”, its “pavement clean”, and (ironically to modern ears) the “sweet” air of a “spot where town and country meet”.

Of course, there have always been naysayers. In 1872, Thomas Hardy composed a typically morose poem, Coming up Oxford Street: Evening, written from the point of view of a “city-clerk” who observes gloomily the “ladies who rouge and whiten”, and all the apothecaries’ shops, before ending the poem “wondering why he was born”. (To be fair, you can wonder why you were born on any street you like.)

In her 1932 essay Oxford Street Tide, Virginia Woolf noted the “racket of van and omnibus” along the thoroughfare, and its cacophony of voices buying and selling, but decided that it all offered an improving moral lesson: “This gaudy, bustling, vulgar street reminds us that life is a struggle; that all building is perishable; that all display is vanity.”

A great street once again?

The continuing crazy energy of Oxford Street, and the passionate visions for improving it, certainly put to rest the once-fashionable idea that the high street would completely die out in favour of metastatic Westfield malls and drone-powered internet retailing. But if we were to make Oxford Street any less gaudy and rackety today by pedestrianising it, might it become just another virtual-reality heritage tour, as Carnaby Street is now? Completely paved over for the convenience of walking wallets, would Oxford Street be anything more than one long, open-air shopping mall?

“Quite the opposite,” Christian Wolmar insists. “It would become a great street once again. An emblematic, beautiful street. Nobody could say that Oxford Street as presently constituted is anything but an urban nightmare.”



The Former London mayor Ken Livingstone mooted pedestrianisation nearly a decade ago: his idea was to have a tram running down the centre of the street. Wolmar isn’t such a tram fan but suggests: “One could run free electric buses slowly down the middle of it. Small buses: single deck, easy-to-get-on-and-off buses, 30 seats or something.”

In time, however, Wolmar thinks they’d be deemed not really necessary. “Very few people go from Marble Arch to Tottenham Court Road; they go to specific shops. And if you want to just wander down the street, you’re probably fit enough to wander down the street anyway.” You’d also have taxis running in the side streets, and Regent Street would continue to operate as a thoroughfare.

The diagonal pedestrian crossings at Oxford Circus, installed in 2009, still confuse tourists. Photograph: Matt Cheetham/Loop Images/Corbis

Pedestrianisation, Wolmar suggests, would give the still remarkably tatty eastern end of the street “a chance to catch up” with the more prestigious western end of Selfridges and co – although the advent of Crossrail at Tottenham Court Road has already attracted new “flagship stores” such as Primark and Zara. “If the west end shops’ association don’t agree to pedestrianisation,” Wolmar says, “they are turkeys voting for Christmas”.

The New West End Company, which represents Oxford Street retailers, takes a different view, however. Its interim chief executive, Jace Tyrrell, says: “We do not believe that closing Oxford Street entirely to traffic will solve the problems of congestion and pollution ... Such a move would simply shift traffic to surrounding streets and add to the issue. We believe there are more effective ways of improving pedestrian access to Oxford Street and the surrounding area, and we have already invested in plans alongside Westminster City Council and TFL to reduce the amount of traffic on the street.”

These include the ambition to close Oxford Street to all diesel-powered vehicles, and to ensure all buses are electric, as well as wider “public-realm improvements” that may include, for example, widening pavements. “This is not merely about reducing the traffic along Oxford Street,” Tyrrell says, “but about lowering pollution levels and positively impacting the wider environment.”

The environment is grey and blustery one winter afternoon on Oxford Street, as a silver-haired woman called Brenda sits on a stone bench outside John Lewis, “just to take in the ambience” on a visit from Malta. “I guess for us as shoppers it would be really nice,” she says of the pedestrianisation idea, “so we don’t have to breathe in the fumes of the buses and things like that, but as for the shopkeepers — I don’t know whether they’d get as many people coming here.”

Down the street, Ali is working at a newsstand next to the tube station. “Yeah, I’ve heard about that,” he says when I mention the plan. Would it be good for business? “It’s hard to say. They’ve had weekends where they’ve done it [the VIP days] and sometimes it’s ok, but sometimes it just kills the business completely.”

Further along, Romi is working at a phone repair shop with a narrow frontage that’s open to the elements. He’d welcome the relief from noise and pollution, “but it’s not gonna happen,” he says. Transport is too important. “Young people they say, ‘Let’s walk, no problem.’ Old people, they take buses.”

At the bus stop, Eileen, a proper old EastEnder, is waiting with her shopping for a bus home. “Good idea,” she thinks of banning traffic. But you wouldn’t be able to get a bus ... “I’d go on the Tube.”

Has she been coming up to Oxford Street long? She laughs: “Nearly 84 years!” But for Eileen, it’s not the street it once was. “I’d get up here when I was younger to walk about for hours, but now I get up here and after I’ve done what I’m doing, I want to go home.”

You’d just promenade up and down the street like they did in the 19th century? “Oh, didn’t we just!” she laughs. “Yeah, we did …” She smiles ruefully. “Gone. Gone forever.”

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