For readers who have the good fortune to live very far away from Oxford Street and have never been there, let me sketch a picture. […]

The street is divided into two sections: ugly and uglier. The ugly section stretches west from Oxford Circus (all of the gates of hell rolled into one fetid location) and is rammed with department stores, fast-food joints, flagship stores belonging to multinational fast fashion retailers and what seems like hundreds of billions of people in search of a bargain, a fight and perhaps some new mascara.

The uglier portion, to the east, is a mix of souvenir shops, the odd chain store and a host of shops that are in a permanent state of closing down and are filled with nasty vinyl shoes and flammable sweaters. In the colder months it’s a wind-blown, soggy patch of real estate that tries to soak up as much money as possible in the run-up to Christmas; as temperatures rise it will start to stink of automatic shop deodorisers and worse.

Tyler Brûlé, Financial Times

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