Europe's busiest shopping street was once the road to the gallows
Around 300,000 people a day walk Oxford Street, Europe's busiest shopping street. For centuries it was Tyburn Road, the route condemned prisoners took from Newgate to the Tyburn gallows while crowds jeered and the hangman sold lengths of rope in taverns.
The road is older still. It follows the Via Trinobantina, a Roman route linking a town near Silchester in Hampshire with Colchester by way of London. Between the 12th century and 1782 it went by several names, including Tyburn Road, after a river that crossed it, as well as Uxbridge Road and Oxford Road. A 16th-century map shows farmland where Rathbone Place now meets it. The earliest documented building, Tyburn's parish church, was pulled down in 1400. A turnpike trust took over upkeep in 1721, and by about 1729 people were calling it Oxford Street.
Development followed the Earl of Oxford's purchase of surrounding fields in the 18th century. The Pantheon, an entertainment venue, opened in 1772, and the street filled with theatres, pubs and bear-baiting, but its reputation kept wealthier Londoners away until the gallows went in 1783. In 1786 a visitor, Sophie von La Roche, admired shops glowing behind handsome glass windows, selling everything from silk and china to watches and strong drink. John Nash laid out Oxford Circus in 1810 as part of Regent Street.
By the late 1830s nearly the whole street was given over to retail. Peter Robinson opened a draper's in that decade and by the 1890s filled a whole block; Marshall & Snelgrove, founded in 1837, did the same within 40 years. Department stores came to dominate, and many British chains still keep flagships there despite online and out-of-town rivals, though the eastern end remains more downmarket than neighbouring Bond Street.
Running about 1.9 kilometres from Marble Arch to Tottenham Court Road, it is officially part of the A40 to Fishguard, though not signposted as such. Congestion, pollution and a poor safety record have prompted a daytime ban on private cars since the 1970s. Celebrities have switched on its Christmas lights every year since 1959.
Source: Oxford Street
