The plans to pedestrianise a large portion of Oxford Street are a great step towards making London fit better around people’s needs. But the proposals miss an opportunity to be more ambitious about transforming the iconic street into a world-class blueprint for more radical urban planning.
The challenge is this: how can we design a new and exciting type of streetscape that genuinely addresses how people want to move around big cities? A new Oxford Street could help transform central London and become a leading example for other cities to emulate around the world, both now and in the future. Here’s how.
Pedestrianisation opens up the possibility to play with the topography of the streetscape in exciting new ways, moving beyond a 2D environment of flat paving slabs to a 3D approach exploring different levels and dimensions. This could transform Oxford Street from a grey retail canyon into a new piece of urban parkland for London, providing a much more exploratory and enjoyable experience for visitors.
This could include green, planted places to sit and spend time on different levels of the street. Buildings connected with bridges and walkways offering different viewing perspectives. Why not peel back the street to reveal a section of the hidden River Tyburn that flows beneath?
This would turn the street into a destination in its own right with a distinctive geography, like the Highline in New York, Stratford’s Olympic Park, or the Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project: an 11-mile-long park along a river in central Seoul that’s now one of the most popular places to hang out in the city. Barcelona take a similar approach with its superilles (superblocks) scheme that redirects traffic around mini neighbourhoods, leaving empty roads to become vibrant spaces for the local community.
None of these interventions conflict with Oxford Street’s retail credentials. It could actually enhance them as the new streetscape creates opportunities for retailers to engage with people in new ways.
While it may solve local pollution and traffic problems, complete pedestrianisation presents problems of its own – the risk of creating new bottlenecks in the vicinity, or blocking key transport routes for those who use the street at off-peak times.
An alternative solution is to create a smart mobility corridor: a flexible type of road that accommodates different mobility needs throughout the day. This would be attuned to the needs of pedestrians in busy shopping hours, but perhaps allow delivery vehicles a window at the start of the day, bikes and buses during prime commuting time and taxis and buses after midnight to ferry people home. This could be done effectively by analysing transport data, like the CM2 bus route CityMapper launched in London after recognising a hole in transport infrastructure from its user data.
This solution is an opportunity for London to develop a smart transport infrastructure that adapts to people’s needs throughout the day. And it could be done beautifully without resorting to ugly bollards. Barriers and gates that help control different mobility uses throughout the day could be multifunctional street furniture, becoming places to sit and eat when deployed and then vanishing to let traffic through.
Currently, there is no real spectacle on Oxford Street, aside from some of the individual shops. While pedestrianisation will improve access to these shops, it won't necessarily turn the street into more of a destination that people enjoy spending time in.
By rethinking the environment outside and around the shops, we could reframe what going to Oxford Street means beyond a strip of shopfronts. This could be done through a modular, flexible network of street spaces where the public and civic realms blend with new shops and experiences.
For example, instead of tokenistic public art hanging overhead, more iconic, ambitious cultural elements could be incorporated into the space, such as Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth or the type of monolithic exhibitions that take full advantage of the volume of space, as in Tate Britain’s Turbine Hall. Or the space could be designed to accommodate landmark civic and cultural programming that are attractions in their own right, such as the ceramic poppy installation at the Tower of London in 2014.
These can be blended with retail interventions that are designed with a better civic purpose in mind. For example, Selfridges food hall could extend out into the street and become a food market on a Saturday that engages local producers. Nike Town could take over the street and run fitness classes in a similar way to the mass yoga events that took place when Times Square was rethought and redesigned.
This exciting blend of different uses of space would become a draw in its own right, taking Oxford Street beyond mere pedestrianisation to become a melting pot of civic, cultural and retail experiences that bring a refreshing new energy to the area – one that should remain firmly as public space rather than privately owned public space.
These ideas only scratch the surface of the exciting potential that a new Oxford Street could bring to London. What’s clear, though, is that there needs to be a broader, more ambitious discussion about how best to transform one of the world’s most iconic streets that reaches beyond simple pedestrianisation. Hopefully some of these ideas might start to inspire ongoing discussions in the years to come, both in London and around the world.
Luke Miles is co-founder and creative director at London-based transport architecture specialist New Territory. Hugo Jamson is creative director at the firm.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
