Oxford Street, London’s iconic retail hub, faces challenges from overcrowding, traffic, and growing competition. Decades of proposals have sought solutions, from transport changes to pedestrianisation. Recent plans focus on centralising control to enable meaningful transformation.
Richard Berry is the manager of the London Assembly Research Unit, which recently produced the report Pedestrianising Oxford Street, on the history of Mayoral proposals for Oxford Street. This post reflects the research findings from that project and does not represent a statement of policy on behalf of the Greater London Authority, Mayor or London Assembly.
London’s Oxford Street is known by some as the nation’s high street. It is certainly the premier retail destination in London. Among the 300 stores along its 1.2 miles are flagship outlets for major national and international brands such as Selfridges, John Lewis, H&M, Disney, Nike, Gap and Adidas.
In this regard, Oxford Street is an economic success story. Half a million people visit the street every day, and it serves as one of the capital’s most popular tourist attractions.
However, Oxford Street’s location means it also serves as one of London’s most important transit routes, especially for buses. This part of central London, the West End, which is also the centre of London’s cultural industry, is a densely packed web of disordered streets. Oxford Street is one of the only major east-west thoroughfares that can be used to traverse the West End.
This means, inevitably, that the volume of traffic needing to move along it at any given time is huge. Space on Oxford Street is a premium. Those half a million visitors are packed into narrow pavements. Transport for London, the city’s transport authority, has said that Oxford Street has problems with severe pedestrian overcrowding, making the street particularly challenging for visitors with mobility issues.
Private cars are restricted from Oxford Street during the day, with the traffic comprising buses and taxis, as well as those cyclists willing to brave the jams. Sixteen bus routes serve Oxford Street, arriving from every corner of the city. The traffic crawls along a single lane in each direction. One former Mayor, Boris Johnson, said that Oxford Street was “bisected by a panting wall of red metal,” referring to the distinctive colour of London’s double-decker buses. Over the past eight years, road traffic collisions have led to serious injury more than once a month on Oxford Street, on average, with four fatalities in this period.
The street environment means that many do not find it a visiting Oxford Street a particularly pleasant experience, and there are concerns that this is affecting its economic success. Growing competition from online retail and large shopping centres outside central London exacerbate these concerns. Local policy-makers and businesses have spent much of the past two decades seeking ways to improve the environment, with some successes, but without yet bringing about any fundamental transformation.
Successive Mayors of London have attempted to solve the Oxford Street problem. London’s first directly-elected Mayor, Ken Livingstone, proposed a new light rail system, known as the Oxford Street Tram, in 2004. Greater London has two light rail networks, in the south and east of the city, in addition to its London Underground rapid transit network and other heavy rail networks covering the entire conurbation. Mayor Livingstone’s proposal was for a limited-scope service, with a streetcar running back and forth along Oxford Street only. It would have supplanted the bus routes, which would have been removed. Later, Mayor Livingstone’s ideas evolved into a shuttle bus service instead of light rail, although in essence the proposal was the same.
Mayor Livingstone himself noted the logistical problems with the proposal. The most difficult of these was what to do with the buses and their passengers. As buses would still be running to and from the ends of Oxford Street, there would need to be new, large interchange facilities at either end to allow passengers to switch from bus to tram (or from regular bus to shuttle bus), and possibly back again at the other end.
When Boris Johnson replaced Ken Livingstone as Mayor in 2008, one of his first acts was to cancel the development of the light rail/shuttle bus proposal, on cost grounds. Mayor Johnson did, however, accept the need to improve the Oxford Street environment. Under his leadership, Transport for London, cooperated with partners on public realm enhancements - the famous ‘X’ pedestrian crossing was introduced at Oxford Circus, the centre of Oxford Street, in this period – and reduced the number of bus routes serving Oxford Street in order to alleviate congestion somewhat.
Oxford Street was still considered a significant problem for the city, however, by the time Sadiq Khan succeeded Boris Johnson as Mayor in 2016. Mayor Khan’s proposed solution was more radical than those of his predecessors: full pedestrianisation of Oxford Street. This was not an entirely new idea, as it had been proposed in different forms in reports by the London Assembly – the body elected to scrutinise the Mayor – in 2010 and 2014, but had not been adopted before as Mayoral policy.
There are complex arrangements for ownership and management of London’s road network. The vast majority of roads in London are owned and managed by London’s 32 boroughs. The Mayor of London, via control of Transport for London, owns and manages 5% of the network, primarily strategic roads known as ‘red routes’. Despite its strategic importance, Oxford Street is not a red route; rather, it is controlled by the local borough, the City of Westminster.
This means that any transformation of Oxford Street would ordinarily depend on agreement between the Mayor and Westminster City Council. Initially, Westminster did support the Mayor’s pedestrianization proposal in 2016, but in 2018 it withdrew its support. It appeared this was driven by opposition from local residents in the surrounding area, concerned by the prospect of traffic, especially buses, being displaced onto residential streets.
Six years later, the pedestrianisation proposals have again been brought forward by Mayor Khan. The key difference in the new proposals is that the Mayor is proposing a change in the political oversight of Oxford Street.
Firstly, this would involve transferring Oxford Street from borough control to Mayoral control, making it a red route, under a little-used provision of the legislation that established Mayoralty and its powers (Section 261 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999). This would give Transport for London the power to restrict traffic from using the street as required. Ordinarily, the City of Westminster could block this transfer of authority. But the law allows for borough objections to be overruled by the Government, which has already backed the Mayor’s plans.
The second change would be the establishment of a Mayoral Development Corporation for Oxford Street. Using powers under different legislation (the Localism Act 2011), the Mayor of London is able to designate an area of the city as a Mayoral development area, for the purposes of regenerating it. This ordinarily involves the Mayor assuming powers that would otherwise be held by local boroughs, this time over planning. The Mayor would then effectively control what development can and cannot take place in and around Oxford Street.
There is a long history of policy-makers attempting to improve the nation’s high street. The latest proposals represent a novel approach, transferring political power as a precursor to physical transformation. While opposition from various quarters remains likely, this may well have increased the prospects for change.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the IPR, nor of the University of Bath.
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