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From public hangings to Primark … a lively account of the capital’s famous shopping street, edited by Andrew Saint
In all its years, the Survey of London has never before accorded an entire volume to a single road. Oxford Street stretches for more than a mile and exhibits, as editor Andrew Saint writes in his lively and erudite introduction, nothing so much as “persistent incoherence”. London’s most famous street, if not the most elegant, has been indulging shopping preferences and fashion fads for more than two centuries. Vogue magazine’s fictional Mrs Exeter might, in the 1950s, have favoured Bond Street, where she window shopped and dreamed expensively, but Oxford Street was already well established as the province of “that increasingly exuberant pair, Mr and Mrs Everyman”. The street and its environs, under the intense scrutiny of Saint and his colleagues, reveals itself as a kind of diorama, demonstrably thriving one moment, jaded and playing catch-up the next.
Initially, the western end, Tyburn, was unconducive to anyone except ghoulish types eager to witness public executions. By the close of that business in the 1780s, Tyburn Road had already become Oxford Street – its continuation, the Edgware Road, turns north there – while the gruesome site was marked by an insignificant tollhouse and, later, by Marble Arch. Further east, the first shops were in front rooms, unshowy and homely, tending to a specialism. In the late 18th century, a third of the 92 businesses were connected to the garment trade. By the 1820s, a flurry of covered bazaars on the Parisian model had sprung up; architect Owen Jones, bathed in the reflected glory of his role at the 1851 Great Exhibition, soon upped the game with the Crystal Palace Bazaar of 1858 and Osler’s Glass Shop, the “most scintillating” of Victorian shop interiors. Continue reading...