Pedestrianising Oxford Street sounds like common sense. Who wouldn’t want cleaner air, calmer streets, and a better shopping experience? But scratch beneath the surface and the plan quickly unravels.
Buses and taxis don’t vanish when you ban them. They get pushed into the surrounding residential streets of Fitzrovia, Marylebone and Mayfair — areas where people actually live. The result? A daily misery inflicted on residents so that shopping trips might be made marginally more pleasant for visitors who may only come once a week, once a month, or not at all.
This is not just a transport issue. It’s part of a bigger trend hollowing out central London. For two decades the West End has been drifting towards becoming a theme park for tourists and investors, while residents are squeezed out. Strip away the people who call it home and London becomes less a city, more a shopping centre with a postcode.
Supporters say pedestrianisation will boost retail and revive the workplace. But cities don’t work like that. You can’t separate shops, offices and homes as if they were pieces on a planning board. Push people further out and their commutes get longer, the fragile return to offices after Covid gets harder, and retail loses its most reliable customers: locals. For many — especially the elderly — removing buses will make Oxford Street a no-go zone. That’s hardly a recipe for commercial revival.
The truth is simpler, and harder. High streets are struggling not because Oxford Street isn’t pedestrianised, and offices aren’t half-empty just because of working from home. They’re suffering because the way we live, shop and work is changing. Instead of grappling with that complexity, politicians reach for shiny, headline-grabbing fixes.
Future generations may look back on this scheme the way we now look back at the disastrous car-centric planning of the 1960s: well-intentioned, simplistic, and deeply damaging. Reductive solutions — whether handing streets to cars or sealing them off from them — rarely solve the problem. They usually create new ones.
Oxford Street doesn’t need gimmicks. It needs a city that people can afford to live in, work in and belong to. Without that, no amount of pedestrianisation will save it.