I went to see the street that has finally been cleared of vehicles and found it refreshingly full of people who disagree with me.
LONDON, England (The London Prat) – I set out from Knightsbridge at nine with a flask of tea, a bad knee and a firm conviction that the best way to understand a city is to follow the water that has been buried under it. This is not the sort of sentence you can say to a bus driver, but I have never needed his approval.
The river under the pavement
The Westbourne is the first of my favourite lost rivers. It rises somewhere in the north-west, feeds the Serpentine in Hyde Park, and then goes into a pipe, where it is said to carry on over the platforms at Sloane Square station like a dignified relative locked in the attic. Knightsbridge, so the story goes, is named for a bridge over it. Nobody can show me the bridge. Nobody can show me the knights. I find this makes the whole district more convincing.
The Fleet is the famous one, the Tyburn the shy one. There is a tradition, repeated on every ghost walk I have ever paid for, that the Tyburn still runs somewhere beneath the Palace. The rivers of London are the ultimate sleeper agents: they have not stopped working, they have simply been told to do it quietly.
I crossed Hyde Park by the Serpentine, nodded respectfully at the water, and told a heron that I knew who his landlord was. He was unmoved. Herons have never respected the planning system either.
Marble Arch and the old road
At Marble Arch I stopped for a cheese scone at a stand run by a man called Gavin, who said he had been selling scones at the corner for eleven years and would be selling them there until the world ended or the council noticed. This is the same corner where the old Tyburn gallows stood, which is a fact I have never shared with Gavin’s customers.
The road I was about to walk down is the old route to those gallows. Oxford Street has always been a procession of one sort or another: prisoners, then carriages, then buses, then the sort of person who stops dead in the middle of a pavement to look at a phone. The legend is that the condemned were allowed one last drink on the way. Today the same sentiment survives in the pubs, only with fewer ropes.
Stop one: the empty bit
From the final week of last month, cars, buses and bicycles have been banned from nearly a kilometre of the street between Orchard Street and Great Portland Street, according to Euronews’s report on the pedestrianised street. The traffic has been shunted onto the roads round about. It is the first phase of a makeover that promises trees, seating and two new public squares, with more work due in the new year. The street still gets about half a million visitors a day, which means it is less a shopping street than a river itself, with the same relationship to its banks.
I stood in the middle of the road and felt illegal. A woman beside me said she had waited thirty years to stand there. Then she took a photograph of her own feet.
Stop two: the verdict
Opinion on the street is, as ever, divided between people who think it will save Oxford Street and people who think it will move the problem elsewhere. The Euronews piece notes that residents had opposed the plan over fears about traffic in their neighbourhoods, but that a public consultation backed it, and that officials had been talking about it for more than a decade. Ten years of talking about it is, in London terms, a sprint.
Early figures are already out. ianVisits’s London Buzz roundup reports that transaction values rose 28 per cent year on year in the first week after the change. I am not an economist, but I know a good first week when I hear one, and I know that a good first week is not the same as a good first year. Every London legend begins with a triumph and ends with a ghost walk.
The Christmas lights, I read, are themed around a boy wizard and a very large shop devoted to him. I mention this only because the street’s lights have been going since 1959, and it seems a long time to wait for a broomstick.
Stop three: the complaint desk
Because I was feeling generous, I collected complaints from strangers on the pavement. There were fourteen in an hour. The commonest were: it was too empty, it was too full, the cyclists had been displaced onto a road that nobody had warned them about, and the buses had gone somewhere no bus should go. A man with a rucksack complained that there was nowhere to complain.
That reminded me of a piece I saw on farm.fm about a petting zoo goat that eats every complaint. I think the council should consider one. It would require less paperwork than the current system and would have the same measurable outcomes.
Home by the Tube
I took the Tube back, having reached the age where a resolution to walk both ways is just a declaration of intent. On the train a teenager asked his friend what a Tyburn was. His friend said it was a type of sandwich. I considered leaning over to correct him, then thought better of it. The sandwich sounded fine.
By evening I had settled into the chair by the window with the last of the tea, and I thought about what a city is for. A city is a thing that buries its rivers, paves its gallows, bans its buses and then holds a consultation. Yes, I am in favour of the new Oxford Street. I am also in favour of finding out what is under it.
If you like walks with a view, I keep more of my daily notes at The London Prat. If you would like to learn how to spot the difference between a headline and a hoax, a UK checklist for telling humour from real news is a sound place to begin, and some Cockney rhyming slang will help you with the pub afterwards.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/