Following the announcement of plans to pedestrianise Oxford Street, Monday marked the official road closure to vehicles.
London-based architecture, landscape and urban design practice East is leading the team to design the pedestrianisation scheme through its transition phases and the permanent scheme.
Julian Lewis, Director of East, said: “As we have seen from Borough High Street to Eltham, from Croydon to Green Lanes, London’s high streets are the public face of the city in all its diversity, its greenery and its energy.
“We design to preserve and support this energy, maintaining the ebbs and flows of these places which make our neighbourhoods unique. The same is true at Oxford Street – the place where ‘Everything glitters and twinkles‘, as Virginia Woolf wrote in 1931 – a street whose future is set to be as dynamic and bustling as its storied past.”
Research has been underway in the meantime on Oxford Street, to determine the carefully located constellations of new seating on the street. Alongside this, local communities have been engaged to discuss improving the environment for women and girls – and landscape architects J&L Gibbons have worked with East on the designs for tree planting, which they say will gradually turn the street into a climate-resilient urban forest.
Copyright © 2026 Energy Live News LtdELN