Montages of the completed scheme show trees down the middle.

but no fountains, bandstands or tented cafes.

It's a big space that seems to lack a big concept.

Or does it? An architect friend's remark that Oxford Street is a shopping experience from the past made me wonder whether Kahn, in the Burnhamite mood of yearning for pre-Thatcher Britain, aims to turn this faded boulevard into a 1970s theme park.

All it needs are closing down banners, militant pickets blocking Bond Street station and a sculptural pile of uncollected bin bags.

Will pre-Christmas shoppers divert from Oxford Street to press their noses against nearby estate agents' windows? The dire state of the capital's property market attracts media attention, mostly at the luxury end, but it's a catastrophe from top to bottom, especially in the new-build sector, with immeasurably adverse impacts on commercial activity, labour mobility and community life.

In 2022's post-Covid bounce, more than 20,000

new homes were sold in London.

as would electing a

mayor who genuinely wants to make his city more liveable and prosperous.

A multi-million pound Oxford Street vanity project will make no difference at all.

Hang on to democracy.

The electric car maker Tesla peaked as a hot stock last December.

Its zenith as a design pioneer arguably came much earlier, with the launch of the Model S in 2012.

It has since left many promises unfulfilled.

of his ilk of US

But do you think it has any significant impact on the British economy or is it just a purely aesthetic attitude? Does it filter into policy, let's say?

I mean, with long hindsight, what you can say is that what else was going on in the world at the time was that America was producing a generation of, call them robber barons, if you like, but tremendously muscular and energetic people.

industrial entrepreneurs and bankers who were building America.

And Germany was building a very powerful industrial economy.

And by the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, uh although britain was still a one of the world's leading economies it was losing that race it was giving way and that must be partly to do with the fact that the you know prejudices in british opinion were not favorable to business here is very difficult i you know you can think of uh you know mr dunlop who invented the pneumatic tire or the great shipping tycoon.

There are self-made men.

There are the people who would go on to found the Shell Oil Company or ICI and so on.

Is that true? Surely down to a sort of top down leadership from the Thatcher government or is this something that's already starting to bubble up from below in the 1970s with sort of ideas linked to the affluent society and that kind of thing?

First up this week, Martin Van der Wei.

A sandwich with Andy Haldane, the former Bank of England economist, now president of British Chambers of Commerce, is the intellectual equivalent of a lunchtime workout with an ultra-fit personal trainer, or so I imagine, having never submitted to the latter experience.

When his BCC role was announced in February, Haldane spoke of a fighting chance that UK growth would beat expectations for the coming year.

But that was before the closure of the Strait and the resurgence of global demons.

The purpose of the sandwich was to find out if he had tempered his upbeat tone.

The Iran conflict is, quote, "The last thing anyone needed, least of all the UK," he began.

But reasons for optimism remain in the form of private sector balance sheets in rude health and pent-up personal savings, all capable of fueling productive investment if and when normality resumes.