Some 30 million people visit London every year, and most of them go to the same destinations: Parliament Square, Leicester Square, Oxford Street, and the Tower of London. One of the striking things about these places is how unpleasant they are. With the honourable exception of the medieval prison for traitors, most of the highlights of London are migraine-inducing places. Parliament Square is a chaotic traffic island, a disgracefully bad urban frame for the two noble buildings that flank it. Leicester Square is dark, ugly, tacky and said to be ridden with pick-pockets. And then there is Oxford Street, architecturally tawdry, blighted with mysterious sweet shops and horribly, horribly overcrowded.
It seems to follow that we have quite an easy way to improve our ‘national brand’. If we made a handful of these key sites actually nice, 30m people would go away every year saying how amazing public spaces in Britain are and what tremendous progress the British are making in improving them. Every other high street in Britain could continue to decline, and the effect of that on our brand internationally would be outweighed by the improvements to Parliament Square, Leicester Square and Oxford Street. Assuming that national brand is valuable – and I think it is – this means there is an exceptionally strong case for public space improvements in those key locations.
To general surprise, the Mayoralty announced this morning that, in the case of Oxford Street, it is actually going to do this. After years of wavering and disagreement, the Mayoralty is going to fully pedestrianise Oxford Street. It is also going to establish a Mayoral Development Corporation: this seems to be unnecessary for the purposes of pedestrianisation, suggesting that the Mayor may have still more ambitious changes in mind.
Every pedestrianisation scheme must be assessed on its own merits, and we must wait for the details of this scheme before coming to a settled view. However, there are obvious reasons to be sympathetic to the Oxford Street scheme. As urbanists are always repeating, moving cars take up about 30 times more space than pedestrians. In the countryside, this is generally fine, because there is lots of space to go round. But Oxford Street has some 500,000 visitors every day: as anyone who has visited it knows, it is literally crammed with people, to the point that it often becomes a highly unpleasant place for those people to be. Delivering up that ultra-scarce space to a use that is only 1/30th as efficient as the main alternative is unlikely to be a good idea.
Pedestrianisation schemes vary widely in how attractive they are. Exhibition Road in South Kensington is notoriously bad, with its obtrusive diamond paving, ugly pylons and unmarked shared spaces. The recent Strand pedestrianisation is also much worse than it should be: hyperactive paving made another appearance, along with curiously mannered planting and seating. The Mayor’s urban designers should study recent practice in France, where a wave of recent pedestrianisation schemes have been delivered with almost faultless restraint and good taste. On the whole, it is a good sign if visitors don’t notice the paving, planting and street furniture: it shows they are doing what they are supposed to do, forming a polite, agreeable backdrop to civic life.
Still, one should not gripe about mistakes that have not yet been made. CapX has not always been a cheerleader for Sadiq Khan and his works. But today the Mayor has announced something bold and important, which is likely to improve London and burnish Britain’s reputation around the world. He deserves cautious applause.
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