The photographed image isn’t very clear and its provenance is a little obscure. But be in no doubt – the red line on the map above represents City Hall’s earliest thoughts about where Sadiq Khan might set the boundary of his control of Oxford Street and its surroundings in order to deliver his pedestrianisation plan.
The map, which has been circulating among interested parties since shortly before the Mayor’s dramatic announcement of 17 September, is thought to have originated at City Hall itself. Its slightly DIY quality suggests something put together at short notice and it appears to draw on earlier analyses of the Oxford Street area’s economy.
It is, for example, very similar to the pink-highlighted part of map (below) from a November 2018 study of the West End as a whole published by Westminster Council and the Greater London Authority.
A significant difference is that the red line on the new map – which provisionally defines the territory to be covered by a Mayoral Development Corporation (MDC) accountable to Khan – extends beyond the western end of the pink-coloured area on the 2018 map to include Marble Arch, for which major improvement plans have existed, with the support of that area’s numerous stakeholders, since 2019.
The new map does not include all of Soho inside its red line, but it does take in Soho Square to the south of Oxford Street and follows Sutton Row to its east through Soho Place up to its junction with Charing Cross Road.
As its press release about the pedestrianisation plan implied, City Hall’s thinking appears to be that the MDC would encompass part of Camden as well as a chunk of Westminster, taking in St Giles Circus and also Tottenham Court Road almost as far north as Goodge Street station, along with some smaller streets in Fitzrovia to its west.
MDCs are already in place for the Olympic Park and its hinterlands and for the Old Oak and Park Royal industrial area in the outer north west London, where an HS2 station is also located.
Previous opposition to pedestrianising Oxford Street has focused on concerns that motor vehicles, primarily buses and taxis, will be diverted along adjacent residential streets. Labour-run Westminster Council, which spent two years following its historic election win in May 2022 devising an improvement programme for the street and its surroundings, involving no pedestrianisation, that had secured the backing of retailers and residents’ groups alike. It believes maintaining and managing a fully-pedestrianised street would be highly problematic, especially at night.
The Mayor could have asked the government to make Transport for London the highway authority for the street, taking only that power away from Westminster. Creating an MDC is a much more radical step, potentially making it the planning authority for all the territory within its boundary, encouraging property development and able to derive income from the area, perhaps to help meet community safety and maintenance costs.
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