How to save Oxford Street – and your high street

Oxford Street is ‘a dinosaur district destined for extinction’, says Marks & Spencer boss Stuart Machin – whose plan to replace its ‘flagship’ Marble Arch store with a new ten-storey retail and office block has been referred to a public inquiry by Michael Gove as Housing Secretary, despite winning approval from Westminster council.

Machin points out that his real flagship nowadays is M&S’s website, which accounts for a third of the group’s clothing and home sales, while much of its pre-second-world-war store estate stands in sad need of repurposing or right-sizing. And he’s not wrong about the decline of what used to be Britain’s premier shopping boulevard – with its boarded-up Debenhams, its miasma of diesel and its horrible Americanised ‘candy stores’.

But John Lewis and Selfridges still count as destination stores, the latter especially for Chinese and Middle Eastern shoppers when they’re in town. And streets don’t actually die, they just become shabbier, less prosperous and more dangerous, as was already happening to so many British town centres in the ‘bloodbath’ of chain-store closures that preceded the pandemic and the current price shock.

So something should be done to make Oxford Street a model for the rest of the country, with the opening of the Elizabeth Line as a catalyst and imaginative regeneration schemes conceived in previous downturns – King’s Cross, for example – as models. Here’s a quick sketch of a plan: pedestrianise wherever possible, allowing only the most essential all-electric traffic; spotlight handsome older buildings and knock down nasty modern ones, replacing them with affordable flats and flexible workspaces; put stylish cafés on the pavements, public gardens on the rooftops and an Antony Gormley sculpture in the middle of Oxford Circus; plant lots more trees. Then rename the stretch between the new Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street stations ‘Elizabeth Avenue’.