Oxford Street has a longer history than most of London’s landmarks. For starters, it’s a street, and such things have better staying power than, say, buildings. To delete a street from a map takes serious dedication. Buildings come down a bit more easily. A fire may remove what’s on the street, but the street will remain.

But back to Oxford Street. Its route follows an ancient road – the Via Trinobantina – once used by the Romans to move west out of the city, later becoming a drovers’ road along which cattle were herded to Tyburn market. The gallows at Tyburn, near what is now Marble Arch, drew crowds to public executions until 1783, and the street that led to them was already well-worn with centuries of foot traffic.

By the eighteenth century, Oxford Street had shed its grim associations and reinvented itself as a fashionable promenade. Shops proliferated along its length, and it became a place to see and be seen – something Virginia Woolf captured memorably in her 1932 essay The Oxford Street Tide, in which she described it as a “bright stream” where “everything glitters and twinkles.”

The great department stores that arrived in the Victorian and Edwardian eras: Peter Robinson in the 1830s, Selfridges opening in 1909, John Lewis expanding steadily through the twentieth century, turned that social energy into commercial power and gave the street its modern identity as the retail heart of the capital.