A Missing Appreciation

I know nothing of planning. Or what fellow Londoners think. But I do know this: you never truly appreciate something until it’s too late. Until it’s gone.

Still, the world doesn’t revolve around me or my opinions, so perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much. I’m sure plenty of people will think removing buses, taxis and choking pollution from Oxford Street sounds like a great idea. But even with my COPD, I disagree.

What Could Have Been

If the plans to pedestrianise Oxford Street meant transforming it from its current form, a sort of identikit, Anytown high street, into a mecca of independent businesses, some kind of Barnstaple Butchers Row for the 21st century, I might feel differently.

Imagine shopfronts filled with bespoke craft shops, niche retailers, proper fishmongers, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. But no. It’s bound to overpromise and underdeliver. We’ll just end up with more shops selling the same trainers.

The Brutal Reality

So let’s cut the crap for a second. It’s not about creating some kind of shopping nirvana, code for “revitalising the area”. If that’s what you want, you’ve got the hell on earth that is Westfield.

Nor is it about offering a quaint, uniquely British shopping experience. As it stands, it could be any high street in any town. The number of drunks, drug addicts, dog doo, used vapes, and tourists being the only real variables.

Each street, in every town or city, is unique. A snapshot in time. To stand on the pavement in Croydon’s North End, Barnstaple Butchers Row, Cobham High Street or indeed today’s Oxford Street is just to stand at different points on the same timeline.

The ups and the downs. The good and the bad. Just like the black humour created by Douglas Adams and his Shoe Event Horizon theory. Except instead of shoes, read trainers.

All pedestrianised high streets start with good intentions and high hopes. It’s the reality that matters. They are all inevitably shaped by market forces. And so pedestrianisation is all about money. About squeezing the last drops of revenue from footfall.

We all know that rather than a return to the traditional format of independent businesses full of charm, we’ll have row after row of the same shops and retailers found on any high street. Just bigger flagship versions.

The illusion of choice. A bricks-and-mortar reflection of the internet, dominated by trainers and fast fashion. A huge open-air shopping centre devoid of charm and character. After all, you can’t argue with the markets.

What We’ll Lose

Now, I’m certainly not advocating converting the city I love into some kind of functioning “London” theme park, like the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Still, much of Oxford Street’s delight came from dodging red London buses, black cabs and Stanley Green the Protein Man.

Without such a sensory playground, there’s a real danger this new vision becomes just another bland, homogenised British shopping centre, at who knows what point on that universal timeline of all shopping centres. Like Croydon, but without the charm.