Mayor of London Sadiq Khan last week announced a public consultation, to run to May 2, on what’s proposed to jazz up Oxford Street. I’ve taken an interest since a page in the January edition of Professional Security Magazine about the proposed pedestrianising. Hard to visualise that the street will become truly pedestrianised – where will the buses and taxis go? – and indeed the consultation admits the only removing ‘most of the traffic’. While the street is, they say, busy, it’s not busy enough (surely suggesting a need for every way of transporting people to the street?!).
Bullshit alert
What do I know, I’m not an urban planner, though I can sniff bullshit, and the consultation reeks of it (‘world class’, ‘space for pop-up events’, transformation, ‘turbo charge it’s regeneration’ – some less than world-class proof-reading there). Buses would be ‘diverted’ (presumably onto other West End streets, hardly boulevards by comparison?!). The trouble, that I see in my own town in its part-pedestrianisation of the main drag, is that take out traffic, you still need an ear for traffic because of scooters. In security terms, take out through traffic and add benches and places to linger and you may be tailoring the place to street drinkers, beggars and so on (already drawn to Oxford Street, naturally). In the consultation, Sadiq Khan talks of attracting ‘more international visitors’ without seemingly seeing any difference – in spending terms and loss prevention risk – between Spanish students on an afternoon off from English language lessons, and families of billionaires. The consultation proposes making Oxford Street a ‘global leader’ (again) ‘for shopping, leisure and outdoor events, competing with the likes of Fifth Avenue in New York, the Champs-Élysées in Paris and the Ginza district in Tokyo’. The competitors in truth are much closer: the covered malls at White City and Stratford; and neighbouring Bond Street and Regent Street (that have been recovering from the pandemic better than Oxford Street, the consultation admits; seemingly buses and taxis work for those streets).
Safety mention
Given the numerous acts of terror on pedestrianised city walks, in Barcelona and Nice, and ‘pop up events’ like Christmas markets, would at least a mention of public safety have hurt? The problem with urban planning like this is that it’s the equivalent of going into Vietnam or Afghanistan – if the free world has to go so far as to prop up a regime with heavy military, you’ve already lost. The document does mention safety, only in terms of road safety. While pedestrianisation could deliver a more terror-designed-out Oxford Street, I see only so much point in a premises-based Martyn’s Law if the premier shopping street in Britain isn’t – on the evidence of this consultation document – giving a moment’s thought to protection from ‘vehicle as a weapon’.
Visit https://haveyoursay.tfl.gov.uk/oxford-street.
Photo by Mark Rowe – FGH Security patrollers for the New West End Company business improvement district on Oxford Street, winter’s afternoon.
