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Influential with a brave vision for Oxford Street
David Cohen06.10.08
Dame Judith Mayhew-Jonas refuses to be photographed down the tawdry eastern end of Oxford Street.
“I am definitely not standing in front of one of those awful tattoo shops or a sex shop,” she says indignantly. “It's just not me.”
Dressed in an elegant brocaded dress-suit from Selfridges, Dame Judith's repulsion for the seedier side of the street is evident.
“These shops are bad enough,” she says, stopping instead outside some souvenir merchants closer to Oxford Circus. “These narrow unpleasant shops are replicated all the way down the far eastern end of the street and are exactly the sort we don't want here.”
Dame Judith, 59, the newly appointed chairman of the New West End Company (NWEC), with a remit to revamp the Oxford Street area, is one of London's most powerful figures. She is listed in the Evening Standard's 1,000 Influentials magazine, launched in the paper tomorrow.
Her record is impressive. She was the first woman to lead the City of London, the first woman to chair the Royal Opera House, and the first woman Provost of King's College Cambridge. She is also the only non-American on the main board of Merrill Lynch in New York (though this could change with the recent takeover, she admits) and chairs the Independent Schools' Council. She will be working a day a week at the NWEC for a salary of £30,000.
It's a backbreaking workload but she is confident she can fit all this in. “I only sleep four hours a night and my legal training means that I read fast and can be strategic about my briefs. It helps that I've worked in the public, private and voluntary sectors and that I know how to bring them together to achieve things.”
In her role with NWEC she has been handed £34 million of ratepayers' money to champion Oxford Street, Regent Street and Bond Street and to co-ordinate the private and public sector. The challenge is huge: to spruce up our main shopping thoroughfares at a time when the economic downturn means crucial private investment is far from certain.
But Dame Judith has a clear vision. She intends to transform what she calls “this eyesore” into a cleaner, clearer Oxford Street.
“To start, we need to reduce this wall of red metal,” she says, referring to the buses which jam the length of the street. She intends to cut the current 220 an hour by 40 per cent in four years. And she will “turn the street over to pedestrians. In five years' time, you will see a big difference — wider pavements, better lighting, organised signage, fewer buses, and the beginning of a new dawn for the east end of Oxford Street.”
As well as re-arranging the street furniture to declutter the area she will engineer a grander sense of arrival at the Marble Arch end of the street. The question is, how will she achieve it?
She cites the turnaround of Times Square and 42nd Street in New York — achieved by the creation of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) — as the precedent. “We are effectively the largest BID in Europe and we estimate that £1.5 billion of public and private money will be going into this area,” she says.
“The development of Crossrail with a new station being built at Tottenham Court Road means that we have a once-in-a-century opportunity to transform the eastern end of Oxford Street,” she says.
“My vision is for striking new modern architecture set around the new station and for the current properties to be redeveloped into much larger retail units with bigger floor plates that host younger, edgier stores and that connect it to the thriving Soho nightlife that backs onto this end of the street. We want it to be vibrant and have a unique selling point that distinguishes it from the western end.”
Will there be trams on Oxford Street? “No, definitely not, that was very much the plan of the previous mayor,” says Dame Judith. “It's too costly and impractical given that the eastern end of the street is actually very narrow, but we are keen to have a dedicated transit system for the street, perhaps a dedicated bus, although the details will have to be hammered out with Transport for London.”
The street will not be completely pedestrianised, she adds, though she is keen to experiment with completely cutting out buses during the day and on Saturdays, and the traffic lights will be rephased to improve traffic flow.
But she has her work cut out. For Dame Judith, a forthright New Zealand-born solicitor living in Victoria, takes up her post at a time when property developers are tightening their belts and with Oxford Street facing stiff new competition in the form of two giant new shopping centres.
This month sees the much-anticipated opening of Westfield, the £1.6 billion mall at Shepherd's Bush which will be the biggest in-town shopping complex in Europe.
Situated just three miles to the west of Oxford Street and spanning 43 acres — twice the size of Brent Cross — Westfield will seek to lure West End shoppers to its 265 shops, 40 restaurants, gym, spa and 14-screen cinema. It will be anchored by House of Fraser, Debenhams, Next, Waitrose and Marks & Spencer, and will offer a luxury mall dedicated to top designer brands, including Louis Vuitton, Prada, De Beers and Gucci. And in 2009, the Stratford City shopping complex will open in east London, replete with 1.5 million sq ft of retail facilities as part of a massive £3.5 billion scheme that includes 4,500 new homes.
Dame Judith gives them short shrift. “We don't compete with shopping centres,” she says. “Sure, some people in Kensington, Holland Park and Notting Hill will opt to shop locally but tourists and visitors from outside London, which is half the foot-flow to Oxford Street, are going to choose the dynamic West End over a more limited local experience like Westfield every time.”
Yet research cited by her own NWEC estimates that “consumer expenditure is forecast to fall 7.5 per cent in the West End” once these shopping centres come on stream. Surely she is being a little dismissive?
“I have been here before,” she says. “When I led the City of London Corporation for six years [to 2003], we faced a similar challenge to the City from Canary Wharf. We made sure the City did not suffer and we'll do the same for the West End. Besides, Westfield is relatively tiny — its entire footprint is the same as John Lewis, Selfridges and House of Fraser combined. So it's on a different scale, and I think it will do more damage to regional shopping centres like Brent Cross than the West End.”
Central to Judith's strategy is harnessing the major stakeholders to revitalise the run-down eastern end of Oxford Street where rentals are 50 per cent lower than the rest of the street.
“We have reached a tipping point where everyone — from the Mayor's office to Westminster city council to the key property owners and retailers — is clearly focused on the opportunity to do something. We all want the same thing— an economically viable area — and on 15 October, all the stakeholders will be sitting down to a dinner I am co-hosting at Westminster City Hall and I will be telling them, Right, this is what you've said you want to do, enough talk, now is the time to implement it.'”
But will they go for it? Mark Fenwick, chairman of Fenwick Ltd with a family fortune of £386 million and a board member of the NWEC, thinks it will be a hard sell.
He tells the Evening Standard: “In the current climate, I am afraid to say that the redevelopment of the eastern end of Oxford Street is unlikely to go ahead. I'm surmising that it will be postponed and won't be going forward because of the current uncertain state of the economy and the deep-seated problems in the property business,” he says.
Rosemarie MacQueen, director of planning and development at Westminster City Council, goes further.
“Right now,” she says, “the eastern side of Oxford Street looks like the back end of some two-bit suburban market town. But the property developers are telling us in no uncertain terms that they won't do any new developments until Crossrail has been sorted out, and so it is unlikely we'll see any movement before 2017.
“Obviously we're not happy, and we'll be trying, with Dame Judith, to get them to shift, but if the big landowners — like Land Securities, Derwent London and Great Portland — refuse to budge, we'll have to look at more superficial ways of giving the street a facelift ahead of the Olympics.”
Doesn't this leave Dame Judith — whose current mandate is for five years only — with a rather diminished brief?
“Obviously we are living in extraordinary times but as long as Crossrail goes ahead with its £500 million Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street Tube station upgrades, I believe that we have the platform to begin to drive this through. The landlords down there are hugely wealthy property companies and I am confident we can convince them to take a long view and start the planning application process now. It will happen, it just may take longer given the current environment.
“Besides, we have an important co-ordinating role to play with the other £1 billion being invested in the area. At Park House, a Land Securities site across from Selfridges, they are spending £352 million to demolish it and convert it into a mixed-use scheme with retail on the ground, office space above and residential at the top.
“It's the biggest redevelopment on Oxford Street for 60 years: our job is to look at opportunities in the space around it and bring the whole thing together holistically.”
According to Fenwick, “if anyone can mobilise the energy to transform the West End, Judith can”.
Dame Judith grew up in Dunedin, a university town in New Zealand, the daughter of two historians. Her father died from cancer when she was five and her mother, a headmistress, became her role model as a single-parent career woman. She qualified as a solicitor and came to London in her early twenties where she lectured in law at King's College London before switching to a career in public service and politics.
Her first marriage at 26 failed after 10 years, and recently, in 2003, she married again, this time to Christopher Jonas, the wealthy property consultant. Does she regret having no children? “In some ways I do,” she says, “but then I probably would not have had such an interesting life.”
At City of London, she is credited with hastening the transformation of the Corporation from an irrelevant gentleman's club into a dynamic body at the forefront of promoting the British financial services industry.
She represented the Square Mile directly in Brussels and fought to ensure that the formation of the EU single market did not damage London's position as the world's premier financial centre. (She was awarded a peerage in 2002 for “services to the City of London”.) And at the Royal Opera House, she breathed new life into a moribund institution by shrewdly broadening its appeal, leaving it this year in far ruder health than when she'd arrived in 2003.
But getting developers to commit to the West End in the current economic climate could be her toughest hurdle yet.
“Defeat is not an option,” she insists, staring with displeasure at the endless phalanx of buses blocking her view as she strides down Oxford Street. “I relish a challenge,” she says, smiling thinly. “I can't wait to get started and prove the doubters wrong.”
Reader views (8)
Here's a sample of the latest views published.
As usual, the residents on and around Oxford St are being completely ignored. They are exposed to horrendous noise & air pollution 7/24. Buses & taxis should run on lpg, with no traffic on Sundays or at night. Residents have wanted trams for years. Either Dame Judith & her rich mob should give residents equal consideration with business interests, or they should pay to rehouse residents somewhere habitable. The whole plan is to upgrade the area, and drive out the lower classes & their kind of 'tat' shops - a take-over by the rich property owners who want to make even more money out of their property. Anyone not upper middle class upwards - watch out - you are not welcome!
- Jane, London UK
"She will be working a day a week at the NWEC for a salary of £30,000.
It's a backbreaking workload but she is confident she can fit all this in."
I think 30,000 quid for 52 days work a year would give me the confidence to "fit it all in", too!
- Myleena Billson, Merstham, Surrey
When I saw this article I thought it would be about plans to change Oxford Street instead it was about the person who like Boris Johnson has no understanding of transport.
With her comments about "the eastern end not wide enough for trams" I suggest she pays a visit to Ian Allens bookshop,Lower marsh, Waterloo where she will find out that trams actually use less roadspace than buses. This is because they run on a fixed track and therefore do not move from side to side like rubber tyred vehicles.
Anyway, if the eastern end is to narrow and crossrail will lead to clearence of buildings then why not take the opportunity to widen this end of the street?
As for her talk about "Walls of Buses" how are people meant to get to Oxford Street and remeber these buses carry millions of passengers who are just passing through with no intention of getting off. These people are Londoners going about their normal lives and for whom Oxford Street is just one of many streets their bus passes through on the way from Victoria to Essex Road etc.
Anyway normal londoners gave up shopping in the west end years ago as its shops are either to dear or just sell a load of old tat, while who wants to walk outside in the cold and rain when modern shopping centres are inside or in the case of Canary Whalf underground directly linked to stations thus allowing people to shop without the need to go outside.
Anyway BOJO will stop her clearing these historic victorian buildings!
- Melvyn Windebank, Canvey Island, Essex
No objection to buses in Oxford Street, provided I can USE one just to go down the other end. I can't, because 1/ you can't simply hop on or off whenever it's stationary, as I did when young, and 2/ it costs more than a £ each time and there's not even a cheery soul to pay. Tweedy Dame Wotsit sounds completely out of touch, and not too hot on retail economics, either.
- Steve, SW18 England
'She was awarded a peerage in 2002 for “services to the City of London”.'
Not a peerage. T'was DBE (Dame of the British Empire). That's why you corectly refrerred to her as "Dame".
- Robin Willis, London, England
Not before time! It really is hideous at the Tottenham Court road end and as such I rarely stray east of the Circus. It must be particularly galling and detrimental for the few businesses which care for their presentation and frontage in that part of the street. Abroad Oxford street is marketed as the premier shopping street in the UK - which it is, but only in terms of revenue. A couple of years ago a friend from Paris was appalled at her shopping experience on the street, especially as she had thought it might bear comparison to the classy Champs Elysée, Paris' main shopping street. There is no comparison. It is embarrassing pure and simple.
- B Williams, Friern Barnet, UK
Have to agree with her. It gets worse and worse as you head toward Tottenham Court Road - talk about Chav Central. Some of the backstreets smell like urinals. And honestly - do you REALLY think Crossrail is going to come to anything by 2017 in the current climate? If they are waiting for that development to go ahead, they'll be waiting until 2050.
- Dave, London N10
As a resident of this area and a business owner based just off Oxford Street, all of these plans look excellent. Currently, Oxford Street East of Oxford Circus has become shabby and shameful. You have my full support to make this once again Europe’s top shopping destination.
- Ben, London, W1 (Just near Oxford Street)
