Oxford Street London

With approximately 300 shops, Oxford Street is Europe's busiest shopping street and is home to a number of major department stores and many flagship stores. Neither the most expensive nor most fashionable shopping street in inner London, it is the biggest and considered the most important. If shopping is your thing, than the shopping district it forms with Regent Street and Bond Street is sure to delight you!

You’ll find department stores here: Debenhams, House of Fraser (in an Art Deco building completed in 1935 and the first in the UK to have escalators to every floor), and John Lewis (which opened in 1864 and is the third largest in the UK). And of course there is Selfridges, which is the second largest department store in the UK and has been on the site for over a century.

The largest Marks & Spencer store in the world (170,000 ft² / 16,000 m²) stands at the junction of Oxford Street and Orchard Street, with another of its stores standing on the site of the famous Pantheon building—completed in 1938, it has a fine polished black granite façade.

Top Shop Oxford Circus is the largest fashion store in the world (about 90,000 ft²/ 8,400 m²) and it attracts up to 30,000 customers each day to browse its five floors. And HMV has three stores on Oxford Street, of which one is Europe's largest music shop (50,000 ft²/ 5,000 m²).

Located in the West End of London, the street is about 1.5 mi (2.5 km) long and used to be part of the London-Oxford road. It actually follows the route of a Roman road that linked Hampshire with Colchester. It then became notorious as the route prisoners took from Newgate Prison to the gallows. The 18th century saw it become popular with entertainers like masquerades and bear-baiters, and the Pantheon was located there. It wasn’t till the 19th century that the area became known for its shops. It became known as Oxford Street by about 1729 and, still a major road, it is actually part of the A40, though not signposted as such. It intersects with the popular Regent Street at the busy intersection Oxford Circus, where the only diagonal crossing in London opened in 2009.

Oxford Street suffered heavy bombing during the Second World War, and many buildings were damaged or destroyed, including the famous Selfridges, John Lewis, Bourne & Hollingsworth, and Peter Robinson stores.

Oxford Street is frequented by many major bus routes and, in fact, the whole street has been designated a bus lane, open only to buses, taxis, and two-wheeled vehicles during the day (every day except Sunday). There are four convenient London Underground stations too; Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, Bond Street, and Tottenham Court Road, the latter two of which are also served by Crossrail. There are plenty of places to rest (eateries, restaurants, and cafés).

The area can be very busy with shoppers and tourists and gets quite polluted by the number of buses running along it. Christmas is a particularly busy and particularly pretty time on Oxford Street as, since 1959, it has been decorated with festive lights each year, usually switched on by a celebrity. On the Saturday before Christmas, known as VIP Day (Very Important Pedestrian Day), no traffic is allowed on the street at all.

Contact

Email: info@newwestend.com
Phone: +44 (0)20 7462 0689

• Official website of Oxford Street

• Oxford Street at Wikipedia