Two of London's most crowded stretches of pavement just got a lot more walkable. Camden High Street has been made permanently pedestrianised after an 18-month trial, days after half of Oxford Street went car-free.
The Camden scheme covers the stretch between Britannia Junction and the junction with Jamestown Road and Hawley Crescent, right by the market and tube station. The council started a trial in May 2025 after complaints about crowds spilling off narrow pavements and poor air quality. A consultation over the summer backed making it permanent, with 57 per cent of respondents in favour — though a separate poll figure of 51 per cent among locals is also cited. Either way, the result stands: the barriers now in place will be replaced with permanent ones in early 2027.
The numbers from the trial look solid. Spending in local businesses held steady compared with pre-trial levels, harmful NO2 levels dropped 14.4 per cent across monitoring sites, and no collisions were reported on the street in the nine months after the trial began. To ease the knock-on effects on public transport, a trial bus lane has been added on Kentish Town Road to keep northbound buses moving. Camden Council is also throwing in a £1 million investment in Community Safety Officer patrols across its town centres, plus a deep clean of the high street in the coming weeks.
It follows a bigger change a short bus ride away: Oxford Street went traffic-free on the Monday before the announcement. Buses, taxis and bikes are now diverted onto nearby roads along half of the 1.2-mile street, from Selfridges down to the Ikea store, taking in John Lewis and the rest of the big retail names. That stretch is closed to vehicles between 7am and midnight, every day of the week.
Why should visitors care? Camden is one of London's biggest draws — the market, the canal, the music venues — and anyone who has tried to walk from the tube to the food stalls knows the pavement crush. A car-free high street makes arriving on foot far more pleasant, and it should mean cleaner air and fewer awkward squeezes between crowds and traffic. Pair it with a walk along Regent's Canal towards Little Venice or King's Cross, and you've got one of the best car-free afternoons in the city. With Oxford Street also pedestrianised for most of the day, central London is quietly becoming a much better place to explore on foot — just plan around diverted bus routes if you're relying on them.
