Three Guardian letter-writers push back against Sadiq Khan's pedestrianisation of Oxford Street, and the sharpest critique comes from Oliver Schick, who argues the mayor is treating a landlord disease with a traffic cure. The real culprits, Schick contends, are high commercial rents, the chaotic business rates system, and the replacement of diverse small retail footprints with large flagship stores that depend on surrounding variety they've helped destroy. Schick frames the pedestrianisation as de facto part-privatisation — closing a major public highway to "unwelcome" transport modes primarily to benefit private landowners. This is the structural argument the mayor's office has not answered: who captures the value when buses are removed and foot traffic is curated? The landowners along Oxford Street, not the public. The bus argument is counterintuitive but pointed. Rather than buses degrading the street experience, Schick argues that the gradual downgrading of bus services along Oxford Street has contributed to its decline by reducing accessibility. Pedestrianisation doubles down on this by further privileging underground rail access over surface transport — benefiting those who arrive by Tube while disadvantaging everyone else. The Crossrail critique is the most structurally interesting. Schick argues that routing the Elizabeth Line through Oxford Street was a strategic error made decades ago when stimulating the West End was part of the justification. That justification evaporated, but the route stayed, and the result is dangerously high footfall levels that now serve as the primary motivation for pedestrianisation. The policy response is circular: build infrastructure that overloads the street, then restrict the street because it's overloaded. From Shropshire, Iain Nelson delivers the political deflation: Khan's description of Oxford Street as "our nation's high street" is London-centric vanity. Whether a street in central London is pedestrianised is irrelevant to someone on the Welsh border, and framing it as a national project inflates a local land-value intervention into something it isn't. Tom Hardy's letter introduces the one hard number in the set: footfall on Oxford Street increased by 13.5% during Extinction Rebellion's blockade in April 2019, contradicting claims that closing the street to traffic harms business. This is a useful data point, though a temporary protest occupation and a permanent redesign produce very different economic dynamics. None of these writers oppose greener streets in principle. The argument is that pedestrianisation without addressing rents, rates, and retail diversity is a policy that enriches landowners while claiming environmental virtue — and that the mayor lacks the power to fix the structural problems without central government action.
