Christmas shopping in London will never be the same. Oxford Street has become permanently vehicle-free along a 1-kilometer stretch, in what the city’s mayor describes as a momentous occasion that puts the UK’s most famous retail thoroughfare on par with New York’s Times Square, the Champs-Elysees in Paris and Barcelona’s La Rambla. Banning traffic offers no magic elixir for the rest of the country’s struggling high streets. There are wider lessons in this historic transformation nonetheless.

First, feel the joy. The concentration and variety of shops once made a pre-Christmas outing to Oxford Street almost obligatory for millions of people in London and surrounding areas. This usually meant a grim struggle through a melee of bodies on an overcrowded pavement. When this writer visited last week on the second day of the ban, no one was getting jostled. The festival-like feeling and sense of space will take some getting used to. Walking over road markings that have yet to be repainted, I flinched every time I heard a nearby horn, expecting a bus to appear behind me.

Oxford Street may be world-renowned but it has lost its cachet in recent years, assailed by the rise of online retailing and competition from giant malls that offer shopping, entertainment and food-and-drink outlets all under one roof, sheltered from the elements. The urban thoroughfare at least has history on its side. Long and straight, it traces the route of a road built by the Romans that led west out of what the invaders called Londinium. In medieval times, it was known as Tyburn Road and was the final journey for the condemned being taken from Newgate Prison to public executions in an area close to what is now Marble Arch, at the western end of Oxford Street.

The modern name, which acknowledges its place on the route to the city of Oxford, dates from the 1700s. That’s when merchants such as furriers, jewelers and household-goods dealers started to operate from the street. Department stores followed in the 19th century. John Lewis, a draper, opened his first shop on the street in 1864. American entrepreneur Harry Gordon Selfridge followed in 1909, bringing modern US department-store methods to London in a grand emporium with a colonnaded Beaux Arts-style facade.

They remain Oxford Street’s principal anchor stores: John Lewis Partnership Plc is now the UK’s largest employee-owned business, while Selfridges is owned by Thailand’s Central Group and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

The latest step in Oxford Street’s evolution was long overdue. The pandemic further diminished the thoroughfare’s appeal, as vacancy rates shot up and lower-quality tenants such as souvenir shops and candy stores moved in — some of which may have been connected with money laundering. “It was our view that it is highly unlikely that there was enough economic interest in American candy to sustain so many stores in such a small geography,” Westminster City Council noted drily in a 2023 report. Occupiers were often shell companies with no assets, which dissolved when the council pursued them for overdue business rates, leaving millions of pounds in unpaid bills.

The crisis period has passed and visitor numbers have rebounded. The area contributed an estimated £25 billion ($33 billion) to London’s economy in 2022, equivalent to 5% of the capital’s gross value added, according to City Hall. But Oxford Street has lagged the recovery in adjoining Regent Street and Bond Street, where a less fragmented ownership enabled landlords to take a more strategic view of the tenant mix. As of November 2024, Oxford Street’s foot traffic was at 57% of its 2006 level, compared with 83% for Regent Street and 98% for Bond Street.

Oxford Street still has a global tourist profile and attracts 120 million visits a year, with 85% of people arriving by public transport. But with a dearth of cafes and food outlets along its full 2-km span, the street urgently needs a reason for shoppers to linger. Removing vehicles and adding more trees, benches and public spaces, as London Mayor Sadiq Khan plans to do, will help. It will then be up to the market to respond.

The real takeaway for the UK economy is in how the change got done. In truth, pedestrianizing Oxford Street was an obvious choice; private cars were banned more than half a century ago, leaving the road largely to buses, taxis, cyclists and delivery vehicles. Khan’s own plan dates back to when he became mayor in 2016. Opposition from Westminster City Council prevented it from happening earlier.

What finally broke the deadlock was the creation of a mayoral development corporation, which took planning powers out of the hands of the local authority. That’s been criticized as undemocratic, which is debatable. It’s rational for local residents who fear the disruption of displaced traffic to oppose such proposals — and for Westminster city representatives, who are accountable to their voters, to support them. But when you live beside a national asset, the broader community has a stake. Seven out of 10 Londoners supported pedestrianization in a consultation last year.

This has far wider implications than retailing and goes to the heart of Britain’s failure to build many of the things it needs, particularly housing. Development corporations can cut through the sclerosis and NIMBYism that frustrate change. The country should make more use of this tool: Oxford Street just put it in the shop window.