Oxford Street is a major street in London, and one of the most busiest shopping centers in the city. Hundreds of shops and hundreds of thousands of visitors daily, in modern times Oxford Street is bustling center of city life. It is also one of the most dangerous streets in the city, hosting most of London’s pickpockets and, back in the 1970s, several Irish Repubican Army bombings. In modern times, while still often viewed as a trashier area, it is undeniably an area in the culture of London.

In the 1920s things were very similar. Many large stores were opening up like the original HMV record store, introducing Londoners to music that would later go on to start the British Invasion of music in the 1960s. The Selfridges department store, althought opening 1909, became the most famous department store in London during the 20s, sporting a rooftop garden and an all girl gun club. Some of the first televisions were also showcased at Selfridges in the 1920s. While often more regarded as opulent by the poor, the rich turned their noses at the street and its stores, seeing the area as trashy. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, had a very different perspective on Oxford Street. While conceding that she too saw the street as gaudy and unrefined, she also found a certain type of noble tackiness in it. She is quoted in an essay of her's as saying "...even a moralist must allow that this gaudy, bustling, vulgar street reminds us that life is a struggle; that all building is perishable; that all display is vanity; from which we may conclude – but until some adroit shopkeeper has caught on to the idea and opened cells for solitary thinkers hung with green plush and provided with automatic glow-worms and a sprinkling of genuine death’s head moths to induce thought and reflection, it is vain to try to come to a conclusion in Oxford Street." (Wool). While Woolf never actually accepts that Oxford Street is a low class place, she merely implys it through a straw man "moralist", Woolf certainly does not come down on either side of the discussion either. Woolf instead says that making any conclusion about it's status is a trite task, and maybe that it would not matter either way what Oxford Street is.