Do Not Pass Go Page 26
Most entertaining of all was her account of the internecine feud between the three green-set associations. Each of the streets bills itself as offering the ultimate London shopping experience, a contest that extends to rival Christmas light displays. An alliance of sorts has been brokered with the Regent Street Association (despite the latter’s grievance at being relegated below Oxford Street on the Monopoly board), with both united by a special disesteem for the Bond Street Association and its double-barrelled director – someone I’d defend more stoutly had she deigned to grant me an interview.
‘She wouldn’t last five minutes here,’ said Sally, the battle-hardened infantryman scornfully appraising a pen-pushing Oxbridge officer. ‘They’re always saying Bond Street shoppers wouldn’t be seen dead in Oxford Street, and they won’t even talk about buses or Tubes,’ and here she adopted a grotesque parody of jiggly-headed, marble-mouthed elocution, ‘because our customers simply don’t travel on public transport’. I will allow you to imagine the grim triumphalism of Sally’s smile when upon leaving I informed her that in order of current real-world commercial rents, Oxford Street not only topped the green set, and the London Monopoly board, but was nothing less than the fourth dearest address on the planet.
When a quarter of Londoners say that what they like best about the city is its shopping facilities, I begin to think I’m living in the wrong place. In common with many of my gender, the prospect of an extended retail quest for goods you can’t plug in or uncork fills my limbs with gravel and my skull with some kind of viscous pâté. Walking back to start again at Oxford Street’s west end I was already feeling the wayward tetchiness of a toddler in Tesco’s; it didn’t help to know I was being followed every step of the way on a screen in a CCTV room round the corner.
It was mid-November by now, but the most welcoming blasts of warm air issued from stores whose product ranges most stubbornly defied intelligent perusal: trainers, jeans, blouses for fat women, postcards of a pre-teenage Prince William. With weary inevitability, when I was lured in off the street – by an animatronic zombie constantly expressing green vomit into a bucket in the window of a novelty shop – the manager came up as I examined his pornographic mobile phone covers and angrily denounced me as a trading standards officer. Is it OK if I blame the raincoat again?
Sally had forewarned me of the street’s polarisation, and it was indeed the case that the glitzier fashion chains and what Harold Clunn irresistibly dubbed ‘the great dry-goods stores of Oxford Street’ were topped and tailed by bureau de change cubbyholes and total liquidation sales. The middle market was clearly suffering: C&A, the most famous recent casualty, had three stores along Oxford Street in the thirties and the disembowelled hulks of the last two stand at either end of the upmarket stretch, plaster-dusted final-reduction starbursts still decorating doors chained against a threatened squatter invasion Sally had mentioned. It still astounds me to recall that the British Leyland of high-street retailing was actually owned by the Dutch.
Call it a coincidence, but it does seem odd that those department stores who failed to adapt to Oxford Street’s evolving consumer trends – C&A, Waring & Gillow, Bourne & Hollingsworth, Swears & Wells, Marshall & Snelgrove – are united by the grammatical assassin known and feared by all high street retailers: the Ampersand of Death. Lilley & Skinner has popped its rubber-soled clogs, Marks & Spencer’s problems are no secret, and if I worked at Hennes & Mauritz I’d be checking out the early retirement deals.
C&A was always a basket case, an establishment that hadn’t so much boxed itself into a corner as sewn itself into a tank-top, but Selfridge’s has been hauled back from the brink. In the seventies and eighties the store languished in Are You Being Served? torpor, its customers outnumbered by fussy little men scuttling about on frayed carpet tiles. ‘They hadn’t accepted that people didn’t need to come to Selfridge’s any more,’ Sally had said, pre-empting my ruminations on the tourist shoppers. ‘All the suburban malls and superstores had everything in the way of stock. What was needed was to recapture that sense of theatre, to make people want to come in.’
And so Selfridge’s has gone back to its roots, these days no longer just a big shop but a place of entertainment. Walking past on the other side of the street, I noted that the lights I’d thought were flashing randomly in each window actually formed an animated ticker-tape scrolling festive messages along the entire frontage. It was the ooh-look factor, and coupled with extremely loud popular music, a daringly open-plan layout and tills manned by Miss Brahms rather than Captain Peacock it’s proved an astounding success: more people now shop in Selfridge’s every year than live in Australia.
Further along, Debenhams had resorted to more traditional. inducements, filling plastic tumblers of generous capacity with complimentary wine and not bothering to stop me and a couple of blearily moon-faced grannies sidling back for seconds. Thus reinvigorated I very nearly started Christmas shopping, before remembering that Birna had assumed unilateral responsibility for this duty following the 1999 chisels-for-all debacle. Instead I breezed out into the street and shortly found myself interrogating, with the slurred pomposity of an intemperate trading standards officer, the youthful proprietor of a souvenir stall.
‘This,’ he said simply, responding to my inquiry as to his most popular product by tapping a forefinger on an 8-inch beefeater’s felt hat.
‘Moving eyes,’ I noted, watching the plastic yeoman’s pupils vibrate under his digital assault. Mantelpiece memory or target practice for Action Man: frankly, you could do a lot worse for a quid.
‘It’s all total rubbish,’ he whispered disarmingly, watching a rare tourist finger his Big Bens. ‘Everything’s made in China. But you know – that’s what they want.’ Despite the current dearth of foreigners, earlier that week he’d sold over a hundred quid’s worth of said rubbish to a single South American. And yes – sometimes he had to chase after a postcard-pocketing shoplifter.
Pressed further, he revealed that his family had run a stall on this site for forty years, adding that some of the other pitches – the ones I’d seen selling pound-a-roll foil wrap, cheap wallets, ambitiously priced fruit or ‘Stop Looking At My Tits’ T-shirts – had been passed down through four generations. Here, in effect, was the last bastion of the old Monopoly-era Happy Families economy: Master Crap the Costermonger’s Son.
The buildings grew taller and pushed further outwards, crowding the pedestrians into a pavement bottleneck – Oxford Street’s most blighting flaw – and suddenly I was having to weave and check my stride, showcasing a Londoner’s talent for avoiding the jostling bodychecks so popular on foreign high streets. The Christmas shoppers were here, but, so soon after September 11, not many of the tourists for whom Oxford Street apparently exerts such an irresistible allure.
Why, in fact, is that? An enormous percentage of the goods on sale in Oxford Street are global ubiquities: if you want a U2 CD, a Gap hooded top and a pair of Nike Air Maxes you could have got them, almost certainly for less, in your country of origin. This leaves the luminous condom, vomiting zombie end of the market. All I’ll say is that it does seem rather a long way to come. I’d only travelled thirteen stops up the Tube and reckoned that was slightly past the limit.
Further down the road makeover salesmen accosted women with barked inquiries into their hair-care regime; a pelican crossing beeped insistently; a wedged mass of buses and taxis juddered out diesel fumes. On I pressed through the bag-brandishing throng, its heads angled down, its legs striding purposefully. Oxford Street shoppers didn’t stroll as once they had, or even look up: all the huge promotional flags and banners that once swung from fourth- and fifth-floor windows were gone, and craning my neck towards the abseiling window cleaners I noticed plenty of strident features whose existence had eluded me for a lifetime: a Barbara Hepworth sculpture stuck to the side of John Lewis; a great Scottish castle turret sprouting out above a steak house near Oxford Circus. That, though, was the thinnest of silver linings to the filthy storm
cloud that hovers above the confluence of streets Regent and Oxford. Dominated by the unspeakable horror that is Nike Town – my own five-storey Room 101, a monolithic homage to lobotomised fashion and global marketing cynicism – Oxford Circus gets worse as you go down. Down as in under.
Oxford Street’s four Tube stations are used by a hundred million passengers a year, and Oxford Circus, more or less the bull’s-eye of Harry Beck’s world-famous map, is the Underground’s busiest. Interesting, then, that its concourse should have been conceived on a scale so Lilliputian that almost every day during the rush hour the modest stairways burrowing into it have to be temporarily barred off to allow the hulking logjam of commuting Gullivers below to disperse, wedging themselves laboriously through a tight isthmus of ticket barriers before stooping away down the low-ceilinged, circuitous network of compressed, excuse-me passages and escalators whose miserable breadth makes a mockery of those exhortations to stand on the right.
In 1928 Piccadilly Circus was blessed with a Charles Holden-designed, Frank Pick-commissioned overhaul that still warrants a visit in its own right: umpteen entrance subways leading into an airily grandiose booking-hall ‘ambulatory’ lavishly decorated with travertine marble panelling and bespoke bronze fittings; two great tunnels, each accommodating three escalators, sweeping passengers down to their trains. After Oxford Circus, here is the flip side of the Alice-in-Wonderland ‘Eat Me’ experience. The Moscow Metro is now universally held up as the majestic apogee of subterranean station architecture, but its designers were more than peripherally inspired by Piccadilly Circus. It’s baldly inconceivable that the current authorities will even contemplate the expense and disruption necessary to sort out Oxford Circus Tube – Piccadilly Circus was a gaping crater for the three years its renovation entailed – let alone tackle the yet more chaotic free-for-all that is Tottenham Court Road Tube, down the other end of Oxford Street, a station whose booking hall calls to mind the kitchen at a party overrun by bored gatecrashers. Such a jerry-built, claustrophobic shambles is the subsequent descent to the TCR platforms that having brushed your scalp along increasingly obscure girder-roofed corridors lit by caged light bulbs you expect to be met at their conclusion not by a Northern line train but a hushed roomful of shingle-haired Wrens pushing squadron numbers around a map of southern England.
Beyond the Circus the street narrowed and the department stores were gradually superseded by narrow, gabled structures betraying this end’s deeper, earthier roots. The 100 Club, where once the Sex Pistols and the Damned played; the site of De Quincey’s chemist; young derelicts laying out cardboard in doorways. And in between them the purveyors of last year’s jeans, offensive T-shirts and £10 watches: Oxford Street was ending as it had begun.
Having reached the round-the-clock disarray of the street’s conclusion and being reluctant to leave it via Tottenham Court Road Tube’s salt-mine underworld, I made for the nearest westbound bus. There can be no London pleasure more fulfilling than to step cavalierly aboard the rear platform of a Routemaster in motion, an act whose fluid choreography brings out the Gene Kelly in us all – at least at speeds below 7mph, beyond which it’s a bit more of a Frank Spencer job.
Let me be the last to tell you what a great thing it is to travel through the West End on the top deck of a forty-year-old double-decker. The 710 Routemasters which still service Oxford Street have survived not through some romantic whim but for their peerless efficiency on busy downtown routes. Without that open platform and the presence of a ding-ding-any-more-fares conductor, Sally Humphreys would be wheeling out bus-berating epithets well past ‘sodding’ on the pungency scale.
In fact, London has only recently learned how to make bad and boring buses. Take the first double-decker, the open-topped, cart-wheeled Type B, launched in 1910. A frail and comic jalopy, looking at it you imagine drivers whose hands spent more time gripping starting handles than steering wheels – yet the extraordinary truth is that over 100,000 miles on the road, an average type B would break down just fourteen times.
Upstairs on my 94 to Acton Green, I smeared out a porthole in the window condensation. Receding behind me was the thirty-six-storey fuck-up that was and somehow still is Centre Point, a monument in cheap concrete and dirty glass to the vainglorious delusion of early sixties London, the other side of the Euston Arch coin. If Centre Point offered a suggestion of the bleak corporate wind-tunnel Oxford Street could so easily have become, I only had to look down at the pavements beneath me to be presented with a more heartening vision of its current reality.
As the first drops of rain coursed waywardly down my porthole, the Asian proprietors of a dozen novelty goods emporia instantly rushed out on to the street with boxes of umbrellas. What characterised Oxford Street’s past, I was cheered to conclude, was still setting its agenda now: the no-nonsense, quick-witted capitalism that fired today’s golf-sale sandwich men and beefeater barrow boys was the quintessence of Gordon Selfridge and John Lewis.
Thus reassured, I placed three plastic bags in my lap and settled back into a pleasantly vibrating seat to examine the purchases I’d contemplated not troubling you with. My £18 pair of Levi 501s were conspicuous by their bright red stitching and, as I would later discover, some painfully errant copper rivets; the face of that £10 watch was already starting to steam up in the top deck greenhouse. All I’ll say about the beefeaters is that there were three of them. If Oxford Street’s first law of retailing is to give the public what they want, then its second is that if it’s cheap enough they’ll buy it even if they don’t.
*
I’m still not quite sure why Vic and Marge put Regent Street at the bottom of the green set: lower rents, perhaps, than Oxford, but higher certainly than Bond; less poncily prestigious than the latter but more so than the former. The kind of shops that survive along Regent Street wouldn’t have lasted on Oxford Street: the silversmiths Mappin & Webb; purveyors of upmarket breakables Royal Doulton and Waterford Wedgwood; Austin Reed, Aquascutum and other gentlemen’s outfitters of the type Harold Clunn chose to introduce with ‘Messrs’. And, of course, it’s all still owned by the Queen. ‘Of all the streets named after famous men,’ said the wit and critic Max Beerbohm, ‘I know but one whose namesake is suggested by it.’ Broad about the beam and born to shop, the Prince Regent was as his street now is. The brief he handed John Nash was to connect his Pall Mall residence to one planned in what became Regent’s Park; completed in 1816, the new street represented the northern continuation of the architect’s Strand/Trafalgar Square scheme, essentially forming a barrier between the noble squares of Mayfair and the mean streets of Soho, home in Nash’s words to ‘mechanics and the trading part of the community’.
Described by Peter Ackroyd as ‘the most important exercise in city planning within the metropolis’ – he might just as well have switched that superlative for ‘only’ – so perfectly designed was Regent Street that almost uniquely around the board it has suffered no demeaning change of use or drastic downturn in fortunes. The defining stretch of the street, that broad, graceful arc between Oxford and Piccadilly Circuses, was to be lined with ‘shops appropriated to articles of fashion and taste’; 180 years on, give or take the Disney Store, Clans of Scotland and the English Teddy Bear Company, it still is. This isn’t to imply that the original sinuous Regency grace has been dutifully preserved: worried that the charmingly Continental colonnade down near the Piccadilly end might attract ‘doubtful characters’ in search of shelter, shopkeepers had it torn down after just thirty-two years; flogged off for a tenner a throw, its 270 cast-iron columns now support railway platforms all over Britain and a church portico in Romford. And all but one of Nash’s buildings, obviously, had been demolished by the end of the twenties – All Souls Church, up near the BBC radio HQ at the street’s northern end, is the only survivor, and Harold Clunn even wanted that torn down for a theatre. Only Nash’s sewers, some of the oldest in London, have made it through unscathed.
While maintaining a dignity appropri
ate to its royal landlords – those stucco-fronted buildings were repainted every year – Regent Street always knew which side its bread was buttered. In the 1850s its shopkeepers pioneered late closing, keeping their doors open until 7 p.m., and in 1882 it was the first London street to unveil Christmas illuminations. The human billboards have been around for a bit too: Edwardian photographs show sandwich men glumly advertising ‘Bottesini Concerts’ and ‘The Pure Ice Company’. Established in 1925, the Regent Street Association is one of the oldest such organisations, and was soon producing its own promotional literature. ‘A deliciously mad little hat to put you in the perfect holiday mood?’ began one of its earliest – and surely most marvellous – brochures. ‘Regent Street stores have them in abundance. Men’s hats? Of course – from the bowler and the homburg to the ocean-going cap.’
Once more I am reminded of the downside of London life in the early Monopoly age. Yes, yes, I could have bought a house for tuppence and indulged my worrisome pyromaniac urges in every one of its many hearths, but at the same time, I’d have had to have worn a hat, and not just a hat but a bowler, a homburg or – deep, deep breath – an ocean-going cap. In the period photographs it’s staggering how all the men carry their hats off with the panache of a Dick Tracy or the simple dignity of a Homepride flour man – or rather almost all, because in every one there’s a chap in the background plainly ill at ease under a cock-eyed brim. I am that man. Putting any sort of hat on my head generates the same facile comedy as putting sunglasses on a dog. That’s me in a bowler, a bouffant Clockwork Orange reject; there I am dwarfed under a fedora like one of the kids in Bugsy Malone, and – oh dear God no – here comes Little Timmy Osmond in a gorblimey flat cap.
I can only blame a subconscious urge to expose myself to slapstick situations by non-millinery means for the absolutely enormous laminated map of Europe I elected to acquire at a bookshop near the top of Regent Street that morning. Even rolled up it was as long as a scaffold pole, and by the time I stood pressing the Regent Street Association’s bell I had already obstructed or injured more passers-by than Stan Laurel could have managed carrying a roofer’s ladder around Tottenham Court Road Tube for a week.