Oxford Street

Yesterday, London’s New West End Company (a business advocacy group) published a report forecasting that London will soon overtake New York as the city with “the largest concentration of international retail brands in the world.” Naturally, UK media outlets quickly positioned the report as yet another London versus New York showdown—and this time, it’s about shopping. “In some ways the West End already outstrips Fifth Avenue, for example in terms of edgy fashion,” Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas, New West End’s chairwoman., told the Evening Standard, contrasting New York’s 194 chain flagship stores to London’s fast-growing 179. Having landed back in London after a week in New York just this morning (my luggage, apparently, would prefer to stay in Manhattan), Jonas’ comparison struck me as something of a brow wrinkler.