In London Town did Sadiq Khan a stately pleasure dome decree. Well, a stately pedestrianised shopping facility, at least. You have to start somewhere.

In February, Khan announced that Britain’s most famous thoroughfare, Oxford Street, was to be pedestrianised. Last week, the London mayor’s vision finally started to come to fruition when Oxford Street was closed to traffic.

My first thought is that Khan, like that other Labour leader who is still a mayor at heart, is focussed on finding solutions to problems that have barely registered on the mind of the average voter – especially as the nation slides into a post-functional pre-Skynet dystopia.

True, the sub-optimal blend of cruddy retail, eBike-mounted phone theft and ultra-low-but-not-zero exhaust fumes does make Oxford Street a grittier prospect than it could be. But this is a relatively minor concern compared to the prospect of the city becoming demographically unrecognisable in a couple of generations, the allocation of social housing to the least productive or deserving, and the conversion of some areas into overflow accommodation and lavatory facilities for those not even capable of meeting those criteria.

Still, let’s accept that Oxford Street is nevertheless a perennial source of disappointment to Londoners and, more importantly, tourists and visiting dignitaries. I can see that. Will pedestrianising it sort it out?

Pedestrianisation offers a seductive promise of a broad boulevard where people can stroll alongside pavement cafés, conservatoire-standard buskers and photogenically grizzled outdoor chess players. A place where children can slip the surly bonds of parental control without disappearing straight beneath the indifferent wheels of a No37 bus; where friends can walk three abreast, perhaps even whistling, elbows linked like Sinatra, Gene Kelly and that other fella in On the Town; where guileless rom-com scenarios can play out, ideally involving precariously piled gift boxes tumbling on to the pavement… All these fantasies have been cherished by town planners since the first slum clearances began and the former occupants were kennelled into the vastly more inhumane tower blocks that brought such a bracing note of Soviet brutalism into the Big Smoke.

This kind of soft-play version of a Napoleonic civic order is attractive. I get it. I would myself select holiday or at least city-break locations principally on the basis that I’m likely to find this there. But for what it’s worth, the two cities in which I still find it most persuasively in force are Budapest and Vienna – two cities likely to appear on Khan’s radar as warnings of how easily European mankind can slide into quasi-fascism, with their order, civility and tranquillity having come at the expense of litter, milling about, ethnic diversity, etc.

Paris is surely every Remain voter’s Platonic ideal of the boulevardier lifestyle. But it has long been so disappointing on this front that it even has a syndrome named after it. Paris Syndrome afflicts anyone – notably the Japanese – who arrives with expectations based on Cole Porter tunes, old black-and-white movies or The Aristocats. Sometimes Paris falls so short of their expectations as to actually hospitalise them. By raising expectations of Oxford Street, I fear another variation on Paris Syndrome.

It’s not that no outdoor environment can survive in London without surging or grinding traffic. The development around King’s Cross, for many years the largest of its kind in Europe, has been an extraordinary success. It’s one for which I take a certain amount of credit – in 1994, I attended a planning meeting on behalf of the Ham & High newspaper and wrote a piece raising concerns about the fate of the German Gymnasium, then part of a grimy terrace on Pancras Road. Now, thanks largely to my intervention, this wonderful old building is a wonderful new restaurant and bar, and for many years also the home of the development’s own exhibition centre.

Thus, what was once the grimiest alloy of industrial squats, warehousing, drug dealing, whores and semi-illicit raves has been transformed. It’s now just about the only part of London that genuinely resembles the kind of vibe a Netflix special about young metropolitan go-getters would like to project.

But this was not simply a case of closing roads and streets to vehicular traffic, shooing the prostitutes half a mile up the road. It involved a ground-up re-imagining of the entire nearly 70-acre site. I am not sure Khan’s intervention in Oxford Street is radical enough.

By coincidence, I spent a few hours today in the polar opposite of the Wild West End’s reality: Bicester Village in Oxfordshire. This retail park used to be a genuine bargain-hunters’ paradise, but has since become a cross between Sloane Square in the 1990s and Main Street in Disneyland’s idealised vision of small-town America.

Personally, I found its arrangement of very high-end ‘outlets’ promoting discounts on initially eye-watering price tags every bit as disorientating and unappealing as the usual high-street offering of vape shops and tattoo parlours. I like my bargains to be discovered in a jumble-sale-like environment, ideally on the wrong rack if not actually on the floor. This is why I love TK Maxx.

You have to start somewhere with Oxford Street, of course, and perhaps staunching the flow of two-wheeled crime and four-wheeled death is that place. But if it is to become a pedestrian paradise, it will have to attract some of those brand names I saw in Bicester Village – brands that I had thought had abandoned the UK years ago, from Ralph Lauren to Gucci to Tom Ford.

I do not wish Oxford Street’s pedestrianisation to fail. I too would love London to become home to at least a few Americans who have seen the footage from Paris in the past few weeks and made some last-minute changes to their Christmas-shopping plans. And if Khan’s Oxford Street plans keep those infernal Day-Glo pedal-rickshaw abominations out, he might even get my vote.