Banbury Market Place

Banbury Market Place is the open square at the middle of Banbury, OX16 5LJ, and the town has been trading on or around it for nearly 900 years. The charter market runs on Thursdays and Saturdays, 9am to 4pm (Cherwell District Council, 2026). It is free to walk through, and it is ringed by timber-framed houses that are easy to miss above the shopfronts.

Banbury market days in 2026

Cherwell District Council (opens in a new tab) runs the Banbury Charter Market, and its page, read on 4 November 2026, gives the pattern:

• Thursdays and Saturdays, 9am to 4pm, in the Market Place
• Second and fourth Thursdays: extra antiques stalls
• On the stalls: fruit and vegetables, cards, bread, cheese, garden plants, hot food and drink

The district council's page has no date on it beyond a 2026 copyright line, but the same days and hours appear in its dated news of May 2025. Banbury Town Council, based at the Town Hall in Bridge Street, does not run the market, though it does hold its own events here. Its Christmas Lights Switch On is in the Market Place on Sunday 29 November 2026, from 11am to 6pm. Weather can stop the stalls: the market has been cancelled for high winds, in 2021.

A farmers' market has also been held here on a monthly Friday, and the council took it on along with the charter market, but we found no 2026 page that gives its dates, so ask Cherwell before you come for it.

Banbury's Michaelmas Fair takes over the Market Place, Horsefair, North Bar and Bridge Street for several days each October (it ran from 14 to 17 October in 2026), with road and car park closures. In 2024 the council called off both that week’s markets, so check before you come in fair week.

The story of the Market Place

The market is older than any paper that grants it. Bishop Alexander of Lincoln gave Godstow Abbey £5 a year from Banbury's market tolls in 1138 or 1139, so trade was already paying by then, and Henry II granted the bishop a weekly Thursday market before 1155. The bishops also fought a rival market at Chipping Warden, six miles off: in 1238 the bishop got royal letters revoking a grant of a market there because it would draw trade from Banbury. An earlier grant had been revoked the same way, and this revocation was soon overtaken by a fresh grant.

The Thursday market apparently ran on uninterrupted, says the Victoria County History, and was confirmed in the town's charter of 26 January 1554, granted by Mary Tudor, as Banbury Town Council's history page (opens in a new tab) records. That is why it is called a charter market. The 1608 charter let the freemen buy and sell wool at the weekly market.

The Victoria County History thinks the general market was probably always in this square, but medieval Banbury sold its animals in the streets around it, and the names give the map: Ox Market in 1319, Sheep Market in 1441, Horse Market in 1525 (later Horse Fair) and Swine Market in 1552. Butchers had permanent stalls at the south-west corner by 1441. By 1888 there was a Saturday market too, important for fish and vegetables.

Stock left the streets in the twentieth century, as motor traffic made street selling difficult. The cattle auctions passed to Midland Marts at Grimsbury in 1925, and after 1931 the corporation's market was for household retailers only, which is roughly what you see now. The Grimsbury cattle market closed in June 1998.

What to look for

Look up, because the upper floors are older than the shops. The County History's account of the buildings gives you a short tour:

• No. 11, probably about 1650: three storeys, with a timber front and two rows of five oriel windows. Tradition calls it the Bishop's Palace, and the County History found no evidence for that
• No. 16: a sixteenth-century timber-framed house with herringbone patterns and low-relief plasterwork arcading, the only notable pargetting of its kind in the town
• Nos 17 to 19 and the Unicorn at No. 20: three bow windows at the front, and a gate arch dated 1648 at the side

Nos 11 and 12 and the houses behind them in the High Street probably stand on an encroachment, built out onto the original open market. Round the corner in Cornhill are No. 22, a late eighteenth-century brick building the County History calls the former town hall, and Nos 23 to 24, a polychrome Gothic pair of 1866 by William Wilkinson. A Corn Exchange opened in the Market Place in 1857 and had about 40 corn stands by 1888.

Visiting

Come on a Thursday or Saturday morning if the market is the point. Outside market days it is a town square with a car park, and a few minutes' look at the houses will do. It sits between Parsons Street and Castle Quay, so it fits naturally into a day in Banbury and needs no trip of its own.

Getting there

The Market Place is in the town centre, a short walk from the station and the bus station. The car park on the square has 41 short-stay spaces at £1.60 for 30 minutes and £2.30 for an hour (Cherwell’s tariff from 1 July 2026), with seven Blue Badge bays that are free up to the maximum stay. We could not confirm whether stalls reduce those spaces on market days, so for a longer visit use one of the bigger car parks in our guide to parking in Banbury.

Nearby

Banbury Museum and Tooley's Boatyard are a few minutes east, by the canal. Banbury Cross and the Fine Lady are up the High Street, with St Mary's Church close by. For a drink, Ye Olde Reindeer Inn is on Parsons Street.