The pedestrianisation of Oxford Street is the wrong answer to the right question: Why is the high street suffering?
It is the wrong answer because it is a grandiose scheme that will be detrimental to the residential neighbourhoods surrounding Oxford Street. It means that in order to make shopping perceivedly better for those who visit Oxford Street sparingly, life will be made miserable for those who live there. This is because the buses and taxis will not just disappear, but will be relocated to the narrow, quiet residential streets of Fitzrovia, Marylebone and Mayfair.
Emptying the West End of people who call it home is further degrading London from a vibrant and exciting world city into a glorified shopping centre of tourist theme park or a hollowed shell. This process has been gathering pace in the last 20 years. This proposal will further signal to many Londoners that the city is not for them.
Some people will argue the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street would be good for retail and commercial workplace; however, they ignore that we cannot silo typologies or think strategically of them in isolation. This is not how cities work. The strategic depopulation of Central London will push people further away and lengthen their commuting time, which means it will add more friction and chip away at the resurgence of the commercial workplace, which has only just started to recover post Covid. This is not to mention that so many people, especially the elderly, do not take the underground and rely on buses to reach the shops of Oxford Street. This scheme will make Oxford Street a no-go zone for them, so how will retail benefit exactly?
Seeking facile answers is refusing to address the complexity of the problem: Retail is not suffering mainly because of the lack of pedetrianisation nor is workplace mainly suffering because of working from home. It is because the world is evolving and we are too lazy to question what retail, workplace and homes mean - rather what leisure, work and domesticity look like in a changing world.
Future generations will look back at the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street with the same deprecating eyes with which we look back at those ill-fated car-centric schemes of the 1960s that have done irreparable damage to urban centres. Reductive proposals like gratuitous pedestrinaisation (and gratuitous vehicularisation before it) do little to remedy problems, worse, they create more of them - especially when they are so often scant on the detail.