film
Oxford Street
A road behaviour survey
A survey of the road itself — its buses, deliveries, crossings and kerbs — from Marble Arch to Oxford Circus, made in the summer before traffic was removed from part of the street. Shot on a bicycle, on foot and from fixed points along the street. Not a portrait of the shops or the crowds, but a record of behaviour: the ordinary, unloved choreography of a road as it was.
director’s statement
I didn’t set out to make a film about Oxford Street. I set out to survey it.
A film about a place asks you to feel something about it. A survey asks something different: attend, measure, record, and let the record speak for itself. William Roy, whose later work led to the Ordnance Survey, began surveying the Scottish Highlands in 1747. He worked this way — not from a single vantage, but by walking measured lines across the ground and taking bearings to either side as he went. The map was the byproduct. The work was the walking. The film isn’t the work. The survey is the work. The film is what the survey produced.
Oxford Street is one of the most photographed streets in the world, and almost none of that photography looks at the road itself — the bus stops, the delivery bays, the kerb, the five-second choreography of a signal changing. I surveyed it the same way: one line, from Marble Arch to Oxford Circus, covered in sections over a summer. I worked in three ways — on a bicycle, in the carriageway, banned from it the moment the traffic stopped; on foot, at the pace and eye-level of anyone walking the street; and from fixed points, watching and waiting for a piece of behaviour to complete itself in the frame. Each clip records somewhere different. Together they cover the whole street.
The stretch that closed to traffic on 26 October 2026 — between Orchard Street and Great Portland Street, now called Oxford Street West by TfL and the Oxford Street Development Corporation — is the film’s subject. The road either side of it, still carrying traffic, is its context. What that stretch was like on an ordinary day can’t now be recovered. This film is not an argument that the traffic should have stayed, and it is not a celebration of its removal. It has no opinion on the matter. It is a record.
I am a New Zealand-born cyclist and cartographer working in London. This is my first film. It was made on my own equipment, in my own time, across one summer.
— Nik van Herpt