Local voices, Strange Things and the guides, written by people who live here.
58 stories
Story · History · 8 minute read
Banbury cakes once reached India in air-tight tins. The Original Cake Shop closed in May 1967 and came down in 1968, but a Brown still made the cakes in 2025. The company was struck off in April 2026, and we know of no local seller now.
Story · History · 7 minute read
The Oxford Canal was planned in a Banbury inn in 1768, and the first coal boats reached the town on 30 March 1778. Then the money ran out, and Banbury was the end of the line for almost 12 years. How it happened, who paid, and what is left to see.
Story · Guides · 9 minute read
No. Banbury is about 5 miles outside the Cotswolds National Landscape, and it is built of rust-gold ironstone, not Cotswold limestone. Here is where the boundary runs, which villages fall inside it, and how far you have to drive for the Cotswolds.
Story · History · 6 minute read
Kings Sutton has a spire of about 60m that Pevsner called the finest in a county of spires, a legend of an infant saint who spoke at birth and died at three days old, and the ruins of a spa the gentry rode to in the seventeenth century. What is record, and what is tradition.
Story · History · 7 minute read
Lark Rise to Candleford began as a hamlet of about 30 cottages at Juniper Hill, between Bicester and Brackley, where Flora Thompson was born in 1876. The real places behind the books, Juniper Hill, Cottisford and Fringford, what the record says of them, and what you can see.
Story · History · 19 minute read
Motorsport Valley is the cluster of racing firms around Silverstone and Banbury. It grew from a wartime airfield, post-war engineers and people leaving one team to start another. This is the history of Formula One in the region, who is where in 2026, and how to see it.
Story · Guides · 8 minute read
Pubs with rooms near Banbury: the Falkland Arms at Great Tew, the Sun at Hook Norton, the Unicorn at Deddington, the Castle at Edgehill and more, with how many rooms, which take dogs, what breakfast is, and which suit a race or festival weekend.
Story · History · 6 minute read
RAF Bicester opened in 1918, was rebuilt as a bomber station from 1925, trained bomber crews through the Second World War and ended as stores, gliders and an American hospital. Its hangars and bomb stores are now protected, and the site is Bicester Motion.
Story · History · 7 minute read
RAF Upper Heyford began as a First World War airfield, trained bomber crews in the Second, and from 1951 housed American nuclear bombers. Its F-111s left in December 1993. Its shelters and bomb stores are now a scheduled monument, with tours from a heritage centre.
Story · Guides · 7 minute read
What to do in Banbury when it rains: the free museum and Tooley's on the canal, Lock29's food hall, a board game café, the pool and the cinema, then Silverstone Museum, Compton Verney, Upton House and Chipping Norton's theatre within half an hour.
Story · Strange Things · 4 minute read
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross is a jogging rhyme for a child on an adult's knee, first printed in about 1744 with a boy buying cakes, not a lady. The town that pulled down its crosses in 1600 has lived on a rhyme about one ever since. What the words mean.
Story · Guides · 13 minute read
An independent guide to Soho Farmhouse at Great Tew: what Soho House and others say about non-member stays, what membership and Soho Friends cost in 2026, what is there, how to get there, its effect on the area, and where to go instead.
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