Time and time again, the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street is mooted for public debate despite such proposals being abandoned by the Westminster City Council in 2018 further to vociferous objections from local residents.
Unfortunately, this issue refuses to be laid to rest. What seems at first glance a plausible idea is actually a very short-sighted approach. If Oxford Street were fully pedestrianised, all the buses and taxis will be pushed onto the residential streets of Marylebone, Fitzrovia and even Soho. These neighbourhoods are full of residents and communities whose daily lives will be afflicted by such a strategy: Imagine a 24-hour bus route outside your bedroom window. In other words, to make shopping on Oxford Street a more pleasurable experience to those who may frequent it once a week if not once a month or at all, misery will be meted out to those who call the surrounding areas home, those communities who have held out over the past 20 years in the face of ferocious pricing out and unfettered gentrification by real estate speculation.
In fact, the debate over the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street sits at the heart of one of the biggest problems London has been facing since at least the early 2000s. To many people who champion such grandiose schemes, central London to them is an ‘other’ space, some sort of a film set at Universal Studios in Hollywood, a tourist destination with names off the Monopoly board, a Disneyland for tourists and the occasional punters on a night out, a gargantuan property portfolio for some hedge fund or overseas capital. The West End in particular to them is a place where no ‘real’ people live. Such has been the unbridled real estate speculation that has priced out generations of Londoners, forcing them out further afield. Not only this, this economic trend has been accompanied by a somewhat moralising PR mantra that Central London is not an opportune place to establish families and raise children, as if parenting is exclusive to semi-detached dwellings with private backyards, so those who have not been priced out have been guilted to move out lest they end up abusing their children by raising them in an urban environment.
But this is a myth. There is no value judgement in where one chooses to live and raise children. This should be an individual prerogative not class peer pressure and certainly not unfettered gentrification writ large. Many people have dug their heels in and led equally fulfilling lives by cementing their bonds with neighbourhoods like Fitzrovia or Bloomsbury. In fact, I met a lawyer once who has lived with her family in Bloomsbury since the 1990s - she bought her flat when she was starting out and when property prices were more affordable - and she told me that the facilities for children are second to none, from good schools to playgrounds and public space to endless activities to all what the city has to offer in terms of culture and entertainment. The abandonment of Central London is what has created this schism between the majority of Londoners and their city. The city does not belong to them and they can never afford it. This has been an unfortunate civic dissonance that has curtailed the spaces that people from different walks of life share: their city. This is not indictment of gentrification per se because gentrification has been at times a positive force that has breathed new life into abandoned and decrepit neighbourhoods like Clerkenwell in London or Soho and Chelsea in New York City. It’s actually that gentrification, like other market processes, needs to be regulated.
But to whose benefit really? This insatiable, avaricious form of capitalism - real estate speculation - has started to feast on itself. One wonders why the retail sector has been suffering since 2018. “Online shopping” is quite frankly a lazy explanation because I argue that online shopping has challenged bricks-and-mortar shops particularly because of this trend of pricing people out and away from the centres of their cities: If most children raised in semi-detached houses in suburbia have their links to their city weakened if not severed altogether, evidently they are not going to go out of their way to “pop to” the shops in what they perceive as Disneyland to buy; however, if people populated the city more equitably, visiting the shops a stone’s throw away may not be such a daunting task after all; furthermore, when businesses are forced to shut down because they cannot afford rent increases, they will leave empty premises behind them in an affront to landlords who squabbled over pennies in extra rent only for these landlords to lose out on thousands of pounds in unlet properties. Charlotte Street even pre-pandemic is a case in point.
I talk of the West End and Fitzrovia in particular which I have called home for the last 12 years but the West End took a chapter from the book of the City. In fact, the City has witnessed this seismic transformation since the 1980s where the old Londinium has lost its multitude of trades to become a theme park for finance and the auxiliary consumption that goes with it. The butchers have finally relented and are in the process of following the bakers and candlestick makers to the periphery, leaving behind them Smithfield Market that may fare relatively better than Billingsgate Market in hosting the new Museum of London, a civic institution but lest we forget, urban space is a living organism not a collection of curated relics where the modes of production are clandestine. In tumultuous times where governments and economic orders change, one thing will hopefully persevere and it is this collective affinity that people have towards their city.
So for the love of God, do not pedestrianise Oxford Street.
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