The planet’s most famous shopping street heads for the gutter.

It is one of the oldest roads in the UK and the most famous shopping street on the planet.

Oxford Street has seen it all in the last 2,000 years. 

Where they hanged Oliver Cromwell’s corpse

Marching Roman Legions – it was the Roman road between Essex and Hampshire – and public hangings at Tyburn Gallows. Here a mob once strung up roundhead Oliver Cromwell’s exhumed corpse to celebrate the return to power of cavalier King Charles II.  

In more recent years, the packed pavements of Oxford Street were home to scores of top fashion shops and thousands of London’s most fashionable people: rock stars, models and poets. 

“Trying to find a friend in Oxford Street. “

In his days as the lead singer of The Jam, Paul Weller wrote a lyric in his song Strange Town. It summed up his experience of being a bewildered, provincial, youth trying to find his way through the crowds of  London.

“I’ve got blisters on my feet, trying to find a friend in Oxford Street!”

These days Weller would find it even harder to find a friend as the crowds of Oxford Street are thinning out. So are the shops and infrastructure is crumbling.

The only thing that seems on the up in Oxford Street is a crime. If Weller did find a friend on Oxford Street, 44 years after he wrote Strange Town, the chances are they would want to pick his pocket and make a getaway on a scooter.

Mobbing up to rob the shops

Crime seems to haunt Oxford Street. This week there were lockdowns and police with batons clashed with youths after social media rumours of disorder. 

Apparently, people planned to mob up and rob shops. So, the shutters came down and the police went in.  

Sacha Berendji, the chief operating officer of Marks and Spencer, has written a letter to the Daily Telegraph complaining how the jewel in London’s shopping crown now consisted of ‘empty shops, littered streets, and fewer visitors.’  

Hunt them down!

Berendji also said the clashes were another reminder of how bad things are.

Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, has said those responsible for the disorder in Oxford Street should be ‘hunted down and locked up.’

All these fine words have their place, but they are unlikely to achieve much. The answer is probably a lot simpler.

The solution?

Sure, keep an eye on crime, but lower business rates too. Offer incentives for young, energetic, entrepreneurs to risk their capital to set up new shops on Oxford Street

Pour a bit of money into infrastructure. Clean up the place. Encourage more shoppers and tourists and improve public transport to get them there. 

Sometimes the simplest solutions are the right ones.