The idea of ​​shopping as leisure was invented here in the 1800s. Wide Georgian sidewalks, stained glass windows and new streetlights encouraged browsers to stand “six deep” to politely covet illuminated pyramids or fruit pyramids. Jane Austen was an early advocate of retail therapy, admitting guiltily in a letter that she once spent £5 on a trip down Oxford Street – about £500 today. Oxford Street in the Swinging 60s. Photo: Chronicle/Alamy Seek out that experience now, as I did last week afternoons, and you’ll find row upon row of once-familiar storefronts. Debenhams went into administration in 2019 and House of Fraser followed during the pandemic. John Lewis, which has been here since 1864, is in the process of selling its floors for offices. Topshop’s teenage dreams, emblematic of the excesses of 90s fast fashion, are overshadowed by estate agent advertising vaults in which ‘be the future’ propositions compete with graffiti tags. There used to be an air of desperation among shoppers here, clutching Zara bags as they trudge over rough dormitories, hand-waving ‘charity robbers’ and Hare Krishnas to get to Primark, but now you can convince yourself you’re seeing the last of a dying breed. Even the huge Marks & Spencer store flanking Selfridge’s, once a tourist destination opposite St Paul’s and Madam Tussaud’s, is to be demolished and replaced by a new office and retail complex. A stay of execution for the building was ordered by the now-defended Michael Gove on environmental grounds. M&S’s new chief executive, Stuart Machin, has been adamant that he cannot make his most famous store a shambles. Since the pandemic has brought Oxford Street to its knees, he claims, it is “in danger of becoming a dinosaur district”. And anyway, the M&S flagship “is now its website”. Selfridge’s, for example, is not ready to abandon the “retail experience” invented by its eponymous creator in 1909 so quickly. The yellow sign to change shopping was not a digital delivery, but a promise to “reinvent retail by putting people and the planet at the heart of our thinking”. These plans included increasing the perpetual aisle of shoppers with more and more new things with a new collection of rental clothing, an in-store “repair concierge” dedicated to repairing worn items, and a second-hand accessories and clothing store. Kate Moss became the face of Topshop in the early 00s. Photo: Richard Young/Rex This project sounds like a very serious development of Harry Selfridge’s original idea, to “give women what they want”. Its famous in-store stunts – a million shoppers came in the first week of its opening to see Louis Blériot’s cross-channel monoplane – have also evolved. This week saw Selfridge’s in-store launch and the ‘SUPERFUTURES’ display. Exhibits include reimagined mannequins whose “deconstructed layers capture the meaning of owning a garment” and “sustainable display materials” that “challenge mass-produced models in the context of temporary installation design.” The window shoppers who stopped by looked less surprised than baffled. What’s happening just beyond Selfridge’s doors seems nothing short of surreal. Symbols of the high street’s current decline – one in five shops are empty, footfall still 30% below pre-pandemic levels – have become the American sweet shops that have sprung up in empty premises, with shop windows stacked with elaborate bags of Cheetos and Pop. Tarts and Apple Jacks. Thirty of these shops are currently being investigated by Westminster’s new Labor council for tax fraud and the sale of counterfeit products. There have been headlines about £22,000 worth of fake Wonka chocolate bars seized, shell companies set up to avoid £7.9m of tax on unoccupied premises, pick n’ mix price hikes and suspicions of money laundering. Walking through them in 28C heat is a circle of hell experience: a loop of huge sweet shops without children. I wandered through one for half an hour without seeing anyone buy anything from the disinterested young men, dressed in black, who manned the counters and exchange desks at the back of the store. Inquiries about how they make a living or pay the rent with all that stock were met with vaguely menacing shrugs. Oxford Street was one of London’s most popular tourist destinations. Photo: Tony Baggett/Alamy Some social historians may see, in these enterprises, the road back to its roots. Yale’s Survey of London series devotes an entire volume to Oxford Street, characterizing it as a place of “persistent incoherence,” for centuries a muddy via dolorosa of pubs, bare-knuckle boxing venues, hacks and peddlers. Its survival depended on being the shortest route from the Old Bailey courts to the gallows at Tyburn (now Marble Arch), where the weekly executions were watched by tens of thousands of people. The rubbers needed somewhere to eat and, more urgently, to drink. In the 1991 film The Ghosts of Oxford Street, punk impresario Malcolm McLaren walked past Selfridges and suggested you could still hear the screams of the hanged. He was brought here as a child every Christmas with a grandmother who told him stories that once there were more prostitutes than horses that walked these streets and showed him where Thomas De Quincey bought his drugs. As now, there have always been plans to improve the character of the place, to give it meaning or to restore it to its fantastic former glory. In the 60s, London planners called it “the most uncivilized street in Europe”. The modernists, high up in shopping centers and the car industry, came up with ideas for pedestrian access decks with traffic below and a flyover at Regency Oxford Circus. Sixty years later, the push was to get cars off the roads altogether. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has made the pedestrianization of Oxford Street – which has often recorded levels of particulate pollution many times the safe limit – a cornerstone of his greener plan for London. The street is also the best public transport destination in the country, with four metro stations and multiple bus routes. The two stations of the new Elizabeth Line, designed to bring an extra 90 million passengers to the capital’s West End, were to be the catalyst for this new tree-lined boulevard. Nothing happened. Marble Arch Mound was a short-term plan to bring back buyers. Photo: Tayfun Salcı/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock The pedestrianization project, which was shown to significantly reduce pollution and road accidents, was scrapped in 2018 by the then Conservative Westminster council citing opposition from local residents, despite the project receiving overwhelming support in a public consultation. The Tory council’s short-term plan to bring back shoppers – the creation of the ridiculous £6m ‘Marble Arch Mound’, a sloppy man-made hill that you had to pay £4.50 to climb, which has now been dismantled – was key factor in their defeat in the municipal elections this year. The new administration has yet to release its plans to redevelop the street, although a spokesperson tells me they have “ruled out pedestrianization for the foreseeable future”. Some campaigners and commentators have pointed to the transformation of King’s Cross, with art spaces, tech offices and restaurants as a model for the revival of the capital’s most famous shopping street. The designer Thomas Heatherwick, who designed part of the King’s Cross regeneration – and was also the mastermind behind the Garden Bridge fiasco – explained to me last week how he imagined it might work: “Oxford Street looks like a huge, long room which has become boring and monotonous and needs reinvention,” he said. “It shouldn’t be just any old shopping area. It needs a much more unusual combination of work and play, united as one place that offers style, humor, health and inspiration.” Of course, it should be pedestrianized, Heatherwick says, but that should be just the beginning. “Why not join the roofs of the buildings, an interconnected corridor with bridges from one to the other and those that cross the main road itself? Make a large promenade with shop entrances on the roofs. Whatever happens, don’t just tweak it. London,” he says, in a phrase that would have been big-band music to Harry Selfridge’s ears, “needs to learn how to be brave again.”