Oxford street

Yesterday

Martin Vander Weyer

Will Sadiq Khan’s Oxford Street become a 1970s theme park?

From our UK edition

I tried to think positive about the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street, I really did. But on Monday evening, Christmas lights still unlit, it was a dark and dismal canyon. Disappointed crowds shuffled westwards from Oxford Circus, passing boarded-up hulks that were once House of Fraser and Debenhams department stores. Shops called Foot Locker, Garage and Under Armour offered no compensating glamour. A £150 million budget has so far bought phallic bollards and some street furniture emblazoned ‘Mayor of London’, this being the pet project of Lord (Sadiq) Khan, despite resistance from Westminster council. Montages of the completed scheme show trees down the middle – but no fountains, bandstands or tented cafés. It’s a big space that seems to lack a big concept. Or does it?

Wednesday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The glamour and romance of London’s vanished department stores

From our UK edition

There are two journeys I’ll need to make after reading Tessa Boase’s heartbreakingly poignant book about London’s lost department stores. First, to Mile End, to see the tiny Georgian building bang in the middle of the pillared façade of what used to be Wickhams and is now Tesco and Sports Direct. During Wickhams’s 1920s expansion, one neighbour, a German clockmaker called Otto Spiegelhalter, simply refused to budge, whatever the financial offer. He eventually agreed to sell his garden so that the store could expand round the back of him. But there, dwarfed by the clock tower, his two-storey house still stands, a monument to stubbornness.

Thursday

Jake Wallis Simons

The targeting of Jewish teenagers on Oxford Street is a wake-up call

From our UK edition

When a friend shared a video of drama on Oxford Street on Monday night, I knew it would go viral. The clip showed a gang of men harassing a group of Jews on a bus, spitting, cursing, making obscene gestures, and even appearing to perform a Nazi salute. This was a group of Jewish teenagers being taken by their rabbi to see the Chanukah lights at Trafalgar Square. They had stopped on Oxford Street and, in their exuberance, left the vehicle to do a Jewish dance on the pavement. That was when it happened. https://twitter.com/JewishChron/status/1466022171143245832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Let’s start with the good news. I knew this story would attract attention because such naked demonstrations of hate are, thankfully, widely pilloried in modern Britain.