Oxford Circus tube station

You can't promote on one side public transport and then completely shut down one particular area.

And part of my gut feeling is that I feel like this is going to be one of those situations where he goes, oh, this worked for Oxford Circus or Oxford Street, whatever it is.

Let's do it here as well.

Let's do it here as well, yeah.

Will people be bothered to go in? As many people or shoppers or travellers be bothered to go in? Yeah.

And that means then there's a downturn in footfall and then there's a downturn in public spend on travel as well.

So then what happens? And, you know, even if we take one step back, if there's less buses running through Oxford Circus and there's more buses running around, but because there's more buses, there's more traffic.

And if there's more traffic, there's actually less buses because you can't get as many buses going around.

So

consider that the ceremony kicked off at 8.30. And the streets outside Oxford Circus or Oxford Street were packed.

Like they were rammed full of fans everywhere.

And as the evening went on, they were just scaling containers, balconies to try and get even a mere sight of the global stars coming through on the red carpet.

There's lots of people from all around the world walking down, phones held aloft.

recording the scene and there's not much of a scene it's just people walking in the street but it's such a change now it's only half of Oxford Street and it's the part from the Department Store Selfridges mostly up to Oxford Circus but it's vibrant there's a bit weird on a soggy Monday lunchtime there's a bit of a kind of an atmosphere of a bit of festival taking place despite there being no music or food which you might require but also we've just seen people running down the middle of the road, going for their jog.

And I think this is the thing about London.

It always amazes me how quick we are to adapt and adopt new ideas, whether it's the Elizabeth Line, whether it's King's Cross reopening.

We're doing so at a moment of significant change for the area, with the mayor moving at pace to deliver his plans to pedestrianise a large part of Oxford Street, arguably the world's most famed shopping destination.

More than a decade on from the mayor originally floating this idea, the stretch of road that runs from Oxford Circus Station to Selfridges is set to be closed to buses, taxis, bikes and other vehicles from the end of October.

So what will the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street mean for the future of the West End? And what does the district as a whole need to thrive over the years ahead? Joining me to discuss these questions are three people who are at the very heart of the West End.

Nabeel Khan, Chief Executive of the Oxford Street Development Corporation, a body which was set up by the Mayor at the start of the year to deliver his pedestrianisation plans.

So the app point, gates has been a surprisingly common one, given that actually gates aren't basically irrelevant.

You can have gates or not have gates, but there's quite a common sense that, oh, worry about throughput at gates which I think is a worry if you're if I was suggesting stripping it out of TFL and you're going to have throughput at gates at Oxford Circus in the morning peak but I don't think it's a worry for other locations in the UK where you don't have London style volumes so I know actually yeah that's the main one at the anonymity point two people want yeah the the the the government uh watching where i go and people don't like being tracked on their mobile phones that's that's been the the other one that you haven't mentioned i i sympathize with that to an extent i my cousin is swiss well he's not actually he's american but he spent the last three years living in switzerland And he refuses to use digital pay-as-you-go.

He's a kind of American traditional conservative Republican and doesn't like the state spying on him.

So he does not use digital pay-as-you-go in Switzerland, even though he could.

Oh, okay.

You know, walk to work is that very long running Chinese noodle, like fast food place near Oxford Circus Station that is still there to this

day called walk to work.

Oh, that's

So we need that support in there.

And alongside that, we also need better access at Oxford Circus Tube.

If the industrialisation goes ahead as planned, which it is, then it's vital that access is improved because so many people relied on the buses to get along a very long street.

Without that, there needs to be other ways for people to get around.

Oxford Circus is not an accessible station at the moment.

Lifts will be difficult, but more escalators so that it's easier to get out.

Every day as I come in and out of Oxford Circus, Jay, almost every day I have to help someone up and down the stairs with a buggy.

because it's really difficult.

No.

No, you get the train to Paddington, then you get on the Bakerloo Line, get off Oxford Circus, get on the Victoria Line.

I don't like the underground.

[laughs]

You know, my parents never had a car.

In fact, my father never learned to drive, so we, we traveled a lot on the tube and on the buses, and I can remember going up on the central line to Oxford Circus, and the ad that was always there in the carriage was for Dynarod, and their side off line was, "Dynarod, choose us or your blockage back." And I always, I always loved that, and in fact, I sort of adopted it as a, as a motto at Interbrand.

You know, we didn't charge by the hour or by the minute, we charged by the job, and if we didn't solve the job, we said, "We'll give you your money back." And we never had to give anybody their money back, but it was always my sort of motto of how to bill.

The second one is Burma-Shave, and when I was in my first summer at university, so that would've been 1963, I used some of my money to take the first ever student charter flight to the United States, and that was on a Boeing 707, quite recently introduced, and it was to New York, and the length of stay there was about 60 or 70 days.

be?Well, it would be the first brand, the Melded brand, and particularly Dynarod.

That was the first one I really...

That was when I was six or seven years old, sitting on a Central Line train going up to Oxford Circus with my mum, and, you know, satisfaction or your blockage back.

And I remember it so well, and that was number one.