Pedestrianisation Won't Save Oxford Street, Readers Warn

A 13.5% rise in Oxford Street footfall during Extinction Rebellion's April 2019 blockade is the one hard number in a new batch of Guardian letters that argues pedestrianisation alone won't fix London's most famous shopping street. Three readers have written in response to the paper's recent coverage of the mayor's plans, and all of them push back against the framing that traffic is the core problem.

What actually ails Oxford Street?

Oliver Schick, writing from London, names the real culprits as he sees them: high rents, a chaotic business rates system, and the replacement of many smaller shop footprints with larger ones. These factors, he argues, have made the street less viable — and none of them move when you close a road.

His point about retail mix is blunt. The large flagship shops depend on being surrounded by good-quality small businesses to attract customers. Swap those smaller units for bigger ones, and the flagship stores lose the very environment that drew shoppers in the first place.

Schick also takes aim at the mechanics of the mayor's scheme. Much of what the mayor of London is doing, he writes, amounts to "a de facto part-privatisation" — stopping up a very important public highway for a large number of users of "unwelcome" modes of transport, to benefit private landowners.

Is Crossrail the overlooked cause?

Perhaps the sharpest claim in the letters concerns routing. Schick argues the strategic mistake of routing Crossrail along Oxford Street — long after the plan lost its original justification of stimulating the West End, a rationale dating from decades ago — has caused the dangerously high footfall levels that became a main motivation for pedestrianisation in the first place.

The route, he says, should have been changed to connect Heathrow and Stratford through centres in south London. That option has passed. "We have to live with it now," he concedes. His broader warning: there is a natural limit to how much footfall is beneficial for urban centres, and disadvantaging everyone who doesn't want to arrive by underground railway won't change that.

Buses get a partial rehabilitation too. Rather than being a main culprit, Schick writes, it's much more likely that the gradual downgrading of bus services along Oxford Street has contributed significantly to its decline.

His closing judgment lands on City Hall's actual powers. The factors weakening Oxford Street aren't unique to it, and none will be affected by the mayor's actions — because the mayor is largely powerless to address them without central government taking corrective action.

Whose high street is it anyway?

A second letter, from Iain Nelson in Selattyn, Shropshire, takes issue with Sadiq Khan's description of Oxford Street as "our nation's high street." Nelson lives on the border of Wales and says whether a street in London is pedestrianised or not is entirely irrelevant to him. "It's not my high street and never will be," he writes.

It's a short rebuke, but it captures a tension running through the whole debate: a project billed as national in significance, paid attention to mainly by those who live near it.

What does the 2019 blockade evidence show?

The third letter, from Tom Hardy in London, offers a counterweight to the skeptics. Contrary to accusations at the time that businesses had suffered, footfall on Oxford Street actually increased by 13.5% as visitors were drawn to "the utopia that was Extinction Rebellion's blockade in April 2019." He calls it "a harbinger, in microcosm, of what a greener, less polluted world might look like."

One number, three letters, and a split verdict. The pedestrianisation argument now turns on whether the mayor can deliver changes — on footfall, access and retail mix — that his own powers may not reach. Without central government action on rents and rates, Schick's warning is that the scheme treats symptoms, not causes.