From the Archive: London shopping
‘From the Archive’ is the regular column that revisits some of the more interesting retail stories covered over the past 30 years by Glynn Davis for a variety of publications.
This period covers many seismic structural changes in the industry including the emergence of the internet. Alongside the actual stories Glynn will be adding commentary around each of the pieces that will seek to put the articles into context with today’s landscape.
From Retail Week (7 Nov 2003)
Subscribe to TRB‘London, once a great shopping destination, has seen its image tarnished, but retailers in the city are determined to restore its glory.’ This was the strapline to my story that ran in late-2003 and it could arguably be written today.
Back then it was the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone who was arguing for a “major programme for transformation of the central area” of London, which he felt had fallen behind the retail offers in other shopping locations outside the capital.
Today it is current Mayor of London Sadiq Khan who is calling for just the same level of transformation. He has made great progress in securing approval for part of Oxford Street – from Orchard Street near Selfridges to Great Portland Street near Oxford Circus – to be a pedestrianised traffic-free thoroughfare. Although he had declared that the traffic would stop by the end of summer there is growing resistance from Paul Swaddle, the new leader of Westminster Council.
He has already been in a spat recently with the Mayor over a policy of initially refusing new licensing applications and ongoing moves to limit ‘vertical drinking’ in Soho. Khan arguably won this battle when it was fought out vociferously in the media. Swaddle is now definitely up for a fight over Oxford Street’s transformation plans, which he suggests do “not deliver on a lot of things that are really needed” such as access, safety or various practicalities such as bin collections.
This is all rather disappointing and sadly could lead to the same sort of inaction within central London that was the case in 2003 when my article quotes the late Sir Terence Conran, chairman of Conran Holdings, who was complaining that it was all just an “endless battle against the bureaucracy that holds us all back”.
To try and address the situation the BRC (British Retail Consortium) had just launched the London Retail Consortium that was chaired by Peter Williams, then CEO of Selfridges, and his initial proposals were for the experience on Oxford Street to be improved having fallen behind because of a failure by the relevant organisations in London to invest in the “spaces between the stores”. This does all sound rather familiar and it is just such initiatives that are part of the current Mayor’s transformation plans.
What was also being discussed back in 2003 was – surprise, surprise – addressing the serious levels of traffic that were flowing along Oxford Street. It was calculated that 700 buses per hour were trundling along the road. Charlie Mayhew, then MD of the John Lewis Partnership, was calling for pedestrianisation in a replica of the scenario we have today.
He argued: “We need to do something radical, even if we lose some customers by having no buses. We shouldn’t just do small things. Taking a 10-year view…then having this main UK shopping street with traffic is just not viable.”
The 10-year view clearly wasn’t taken and very little has changed between 2003 and today. The fortunes of Oxford Street and the surrounding central London shopping areas continue to be held back from any transformational progress by bureaucracy and various bodies continuing to argue to the point of stasis.
