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.
In the late 19th century, a rank of glistening hackney cabs still hogged the middle of the street, with passengers stepping over vast quantities of horse manure. Underground, however, everything was changing. With the opening of the Central line in July 1900, the so-called tuppenny ticket revolutionised access to Oxford Street. Motor traffic came and went, with modernising transport planners, besotted by monorails and high-level walkways, enjoying a golden age around 1960. For the rest, Oxford Street waits for Crossrail.
By the early 1900s, the street was like the long gallery in an Elizabethan mansion, the family portraits replaced by stores bearing their founders’ names: Lewis, Evans, Robinson, Waring, Bourne, Hollingsworth, Marshall and others – those wily, doughty, tradesmen from Yorkshire, Staffordshire or Somerset. They built their premises in old styles from an overstocked architectural larder, often to satisfy their ground landlords. Department stores stood thickest on the north side, where the sun shone, backing on to a useful warren of smaller streets and yards.
The focal point, Oxford Circus, was a late arrival. It was demarcated by a set of four restrained quadrants designed by John Nash within his wider scheme for Regent Street, which were replaced just before the first world war. On the north-east corner was Peter Robinson’s flagship store. A Yorkshire farmer’s son turned haberdasher and draper, Robinson had come south in the 1830s and, with his sons, grasped the mourning-wear market.
Gordon Selfridge, who dismissed Peter Robinson as a company “run by accountants”, initially went into partnership in London with Samuel Waring, whose furnishing and decorating store was a reminder of a different Oxford Street specialism. Selfridge turned to a leading architect from Chicago, Daniel Burnham. At a stroke the London department store as building type became innovative, with a speedily built steel-framed building, albeit clad in classical stonework.
If shopping was the engine, cafes and restaurants were the fuel. Fun palaces, some architecturally and decoratively distinguished, offered their own temptations. The most notable was James Wyatt’s Pantheon, site of concerts and masked balls (and now Marks & Spencer). Later, the street was neatly bookended by the Lyons empire. Maison Lyons lay below the Cumberland Hotel at Marble Arch, and Lyons Corner House on the corner of Tottenham Court Road. The latter’s afterlife was as the Virgin Megastore and then Primark. Sophisticated decorative schemes, all lost, had been designed for Lyons by Oliver Bernard, the father of Soho’s favourite son, Jeffrey Bernard. Happily, the 100 Club, an unadorned 80-year-old black box, is still there, while Peter Robinson’s rooftop restaurant has become the accounting department of its successor, Topshop. Photographs (one of the glories of this book) show the coved vaults painted with histrionic scenes from Wagner operas.
Volume 53 of the Survey of London is a bravura exercise in social and cultural history, topography and architecture. With Oxford Street under threat from internet shopping and now made ghostly by the pandemic, in this book’s pages we might just be reading its obituary.
• Survey of London: Volume 53: Oxford Street is published by Yale (RRP £75).
