Curbance giants threaten Oxford Street

Oxford St., 363, is a building steeped in British history and culture. It was the flagship store of the venerated entertainment retailer HMV for 70 years, helping the Beatles launch their first major record deal in 1962.

Today this landmark is home to Candy World, one of more than two dozen shabby American-themed stores selling candy and trinkets whose recent mysterious explosion on one of London's most popular shopping thoroughfares has confounded officials and property experts.

Their spread shows the decay of Oxford Street. The local authority is investigating some of the stores in connection with a range of offenses including tax avoidance and selling counterfeit chocolate, watches, and vapes, a result of online retail, sky-high business taxes and pandemic lockdowns.

Telling this story means that you can enter the web of commercial property ownership that spans Hong Kong investment firms and London's giant real estate companies, behind the shelves of Jolly Ranchers and Twinkies. Financial experts say it requires negotiating Britain's opaque system of business and leaseholder registration, which enables shady activity to go unchecked.

There is a lot that puzzles industry figures. Many agree that something is not right, but they can't work out exactly what it is.

Dan Neidle, former head of tax at Clifford Chance, said these stores have come up a lot in my discussions with people in the tax evasion and money laundering world. They are all a bit mystified as to what they are doing because it doesn't make sense. For 650 years, crowds swarmed Oxford Street to heckle convicts being carted from the prison at one end to the gallows at the other end.

The mass public hangings stopped in the 1780s and the street soon reinvented itself as a shopping destination. It had begun to redefine the retail experience in the 1860s. Selfridges, which opened in 1909, became attractions in their own way.

The wide sidewalks have always been rough around the edges, peppered with tacky souvenirs and placard-waving preachers of doom.

Today it faces a unprecedented crisis, its stores struggling to compete with online retail while struggling to cope with crippling overheads - and that was before Covid - 19. According to Stuart Machin, chief executive of beloved upmarket retailer Marks Spencer, who wrote in June that Oxford Street was headed for extinction, as mega brands like Debenhams and Topshop have gone, leaving 20% of the street empty. The candy stores have stepped into that void.