One of the functions of Oxford Street, fabled London shopping thoroughfare, is to be a perpetually unsolvable national problem. For decades, the issue has been that it is too busy, prompting periodic proposals for monorails and trams and plans for pedestrianisation and rearranging traffic. It was a widely held opinion that it was a horrible place, with crowds of shoppers forever pushing you off the pavement. Now it seems that it is not busy enough. Sacha Berendji, operations director at Marks & Spencer, has warned that something must be done to save this “jewel in London’s shopping crown”, on account of its “empty shops” and “fewer visitors”.
But perhaps a lessening of its crowds would be no bad thing. It is not written in Magna Carta that Oxford Street should forever contain as much retail space as conceivably possible. The ancient Romans, when they first built a road there, never imagined that greedy tycoons of the early 20th century would cram it with giant department stores too big for its narrow width, which is the cause of the congestion from which it has suffered since.
