One of the functions of Oxford Street, fabled London shopping thoroughfare, is to be a perpetually unsolvable national problem. For decades, the issue has been that it is too busy, prompting periodic proposals for monorails and trams and plans for pedestrianisation and rearranging traffic. It was a widely held opinion that it was a horrible place, with crowds of shoppers forever pushing you off the pavement. Now it seems that it is not busy enough. Sacha Berendji, operations director at Marks & Spencer, has warned that something must be done to save this “jewel in London’s shopping crown”, on account of its “empty shops” and “fewer visitors”.
But perhaps a lessening of its crowds would be no bad thing. It is not written in Magna Carta that Oxford Street should forever contain as much retail space as conceivably possible. The ancient Romans, when they first built a road there, never imagined that greedy tycoons of the early 20th century would cram it with giant department stores too big for its narrow width, which is the cause of the congestion from which it has suffered since.
If people prefer the greater comfort and safety of shopping centres in less central locations, with benefits to local economies, leaving Oxford Street available for such things as, say, affordable housing, not to mention pleasant strolls along its pavements, would that not be a win all round?
Humpty-dumpty task
I’m not one to join lynch mobs. I certainly don’t condone the hate mail sent to Lyndon Thomas plant hire, the blameless company that hired out the digger that was used to demolish the burnt-out remnants of the Crooked House pub in the Staffordshire village of Himley.
The media frenzy around the destruction of this 258-year-old building, which tilted like a sinking ship due to mining subsidence underneath, has been extreme to the point of weirdness. But, given that an unrepeatable fluke of history, a source of wonder and pleasure to so many, has been destroyed, I too feel rage.
To give any culprits, if arson is proved, the near-impossible task of putting this architectural humpty-dumpty back together would seem a fair and proportionate punishment.
The heights of folly
In other construction news, the housebuilder Persimmon, never known for the luxury of its products, has announced “smart” plans for cutting costs, which include using cheaper materials, squeezing subcontractors and firing people.
Meanwhile, in the grounds of Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, the Rothschild Foundation has commissioned a 12-metre-high ceramic pavilion in the shape of a wedding cake, decorated by dolphins, putti, mermaids and cupids, by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos.
At Old Oak Common in west London, as part of the multibillion-pound tragicomedy that is the HS2 railway project, two large and expensive tunnel-boring machines are to be kept inactive underground until the unknown time when a decision will be made about rebuilding Euston station.
The cake looks delightful, and might fill a small part of that aching void, left by the loss of the Crooked House, in the national appetite for well-I-never architecture. The buried machines, which are the length of nuclear submarines, might make a fascinating puzzle for future archaeologists. But it’s hard not to notice that something is misaligned with the distribution of resources when the places where people live are to be made still more miserable than they already are, while money can found for these different sorts of folly.
Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture critic
