Oxford Street is a central London thoroughfare associated with two different beginnings in the novel: Robin Ellacott’s uncertain entry into the city’s working world and Lula Landry’s discovery as a model. These contrasting episodes place the street between ordinary urban movement and the machinery of celebrity, while its surroundings help mark the class divisions that structure the wider investigation.

Robin’s First Working Day

On the first day of a week-long secretarial assignment, Robin makes her way through roadworks at the top of Oxford Street, consulting a hand-drawn map supplied by the temping agency. She has been taking temporary jobs since moving to London to live with Matthew, but expects to move on to “proper” interviews. The city feels vast and difficult to read after the small Yorkshire town she left, and the roadworks’ metal barriers and blue plastic walls obscure landmarks on her map.

The episode gives Oxford Street the character of a threshold rather than a destination. Robin is trying to find her way toward Denmark Street while negotiating a city she has not yet made her own. Her map, the blocked sightlines, and the unfinished road capture the practical uncertainty of starting over in London; the street is a real obstacle in the daily search for work, not merely a glamorous urban backdrop.

Lula’s Discovery

Oxford Street also enters the story through the account of Lula’s rise. John Bristow tells Strike that Lula was discovered while shopping there with her adoptive mother. She was taken on by Athena, described as one of the most prestigious modeling agencies, and was working full-time as a model by seventeen. By the time of her death, Bristow says, she was worth around ten million pounds.

The street therefore anchors the beginning of a transformation from a girl shopping with her mother into a highly visible and wealthy public figure. Bristow’s account comes amid his grief over Lula’s death and his sense that everyone believed they knew her. The scale of her success makes the contrast especially sharp: a discovery on a public shopping street led to a life in which celebrity exposure could make Lula seem familiar to strangers while leaving her private history less understood.

A Social Geography of London

Oxford Street’s two associations belong to different registers of London life. Robin encounters its roadworks as a newcomer dependent on agency directions and temporary employment; Lula’s remembered encounter there becomes the first step in a prestigious modeling career. The same urban setting can thus signify precarious navigation for one woman and access to exceptional wealth and visibility for another.

That contrast is widened by the novel’s other London spaces. The immaculate, permit-controlled houses around Kentigern Gardens represent guarded affluence, while St. Elmo’s Hostel sits beside a noisy concrete flyover in a visibly more deprived environment. Oxford Street lies within this broader social map: public and traversable, yet connected to sharply unequal routes through the city. Its importance is less that it resolves those inequalities than that the separate stories attached to it make them visible.