Something's Gotta Give...

Oxford Street is like a clogged artery in London's already strained circulatory system. I've recently been doing some writing for a popular men's magazine, the offices of which are situated just off the capital's consumerist centre. With the affluence of Fitzrovia to the North and Soho's achingly cool underbelly to the South, it should be the ultimate location for a young man. But I cannot stand it.

Every time I alight my commute, I am greeted by a seething wall of flaring nostrils, obtrusive backpacks and squawking shoppers. Walking 2oo metres takes a good five minutes; on a clear street I could make the distance walking on my hands in that time. No matter how relaxed I feel before, I am always a bulldozing maniac after I get to Oxford street.

It's not just the volume of people that feels oppressive, it's the fact that nearly every one of them doesn't look where they are going. The Oxford Street shopper is too busy gazing, dewy-eyed at window displays in Topshop to notice another dogged human being careering toward them. There are those (and, sorry, but they are nearly always women) who flit their gaze from one peripheral distraction to the next with utter disregard to the oncoming problem that is me in a pushy mood. I have taken to standing still, like a furious statue, in front of these folk, until they literally walk into me. So amazed, so taken aback are they that there is another form blocking their air headed meander, that they apologise profusely, before floating their glazed optics upward to shopping heaven once more.

The pedestrian on Oxford Street may be infuriating, but they are merely the cross-eyed figurehead of a city that is fundamentally overpopulated.

As of last year, London is home to an estimated 7.5 million souls. That makes it the most populous city in the European Union. There are too many people who live in, visit or commute to London.

I am not about to take a leaf out of everyone's favourite social commentator, Morrisey's book, and be misquoted as saying there are too many foreigners in London. I grew up in rural Leicestershire, so I can hardly call myself a Londoner born and bred. What I am saying is that London's infrastructure is essentially the same as it was in post-war Britain, when large chunks of the capital were rebuilt in the destructive wake of the Blitz.

London's population at that time was actually larger than it is now, but far less clustered. London today, in the shadow of the City's profligate spending, is characterized by an increasingly large gulf between where people can afford to live and where they choose to spend their time. Londoner's gravitate towards certain areas just as much as tourists to, and Oxford Street is one of those areas.

What's to be done? Oxford Street is already closed to all traffic but taxis and buses (and the odd, anachronistic rickshaw,) yet the place is still packed. Perhaps we could implement a similar restrictiveness on people. If you are too large to occupy the surface area of an average human, or too inattentive to avoid the oncoming public, you cannot walk along Oxford Street. Maybe department stores could confuse shoppers by, after enticing gullible consumers in with bright flashing lights and shiny materials, siphoning them off into a different area of London. Provided their goldfish attention span was indulged with garish SALE signs, they wouldn't even notice.

This would clear the way for those grumpy sods, such as myself, who use the pavement as a medium for promenaded transport from one place to another, to actually walk somewhere without pushing overweight bargain hunters under the wheels of a bendy bus.

If Oxford street keeps burgeoning under the strain of too many people, something will snap. And I'm worried it might be my a vein somewhere in my temple.