Europe’s busiest shopping street is looking distinctly scruffy these days. Many of Oxford Street’s retail spaces are vacant and others occupied by a suspiciously high number of giant sweet shops, which seem, somehow, able to afford the rent. There are no doubt many reasons for this – national decline; Covid-19; the appearance of glitzier, less weather-dependent shopping alternatives at either end of the Central Line. But a big factor is surely the street itself, a dirty grey canyon choked with buses and cabs and the pollution they spit out.
So in 2016, Transport for London finally unveiled long-discussed plans to pedestrianise Oxford Street: curtailing or diverting those dozens of bus routes, raising the road surface to match the pavements, installing more trees and public art. Had it all gone to plan, Oxford Street should have become a “traffic-free pedestrian boulevard” years ago.
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