CHAPTER IX
Oxford Street
For the casual passer-by, there is little now to mark off the
character of the Grosvenor estate's frontage to Oxford
Street from the remainder of what has for two centuries
been one of the world's longest shopping streets, consisting
of over a mile of uninterrupted commercial development,
now almost exclusively Victorian or more recent in date.
The Grosvenors' portion of this, between Park Lane and
Davies Street, merges naturally with the rest, for during the
present century Oxford Street has gradually assumed a
special kind of commercial homogeneity, notably at shop
level.
This is not a new phenomenon. Tallis's view of Oxford
Street (fig. 42), drawn for his guide of 1838–40 and offering
a conspectus of the whole street's appearance at that date,
shows that it then consisted almost uniformly of modest,
irregular Georgian houses with shop fronts; only at the
very west end close to Park Lane, where there was a scatter
of substantial private houses and their outbuildings, did
our portion diverge from this pattern. Yet a visitor seventy
years ago, just before Selfridges made its imposing
presence known, might have derived a different impression. At that time the north side of Oxford Street was
still much as in Tallis's day, but west of Davies Street the
south side had been entirely rebuilt, mainly over a twentyfive-year span between 1865 and 1890. This reconstruction
had not led to the kind of informal homogeneity attained in
Mount Street, the estate's other shopping street to be
rebuilt at this time. But it did bring greater uniformity
than other stretches of Oxford Street (where ownership of
the freehold was more fragmented) could then boast.
Today, commercial pressures and the decline of the
autocratic traditions of estate management which prevailed in the later nineteenth century have contributed to a
return to the old state of affairs.