Banbury
Banbury is an historic market town and civil parish on the River Cherwell in Oxfordshire, South East England. The parish had a population of 54,335 at the 2021 Census.
Banbury is a significant commercial and retail centre for the surrounding area of north Oxfordshire and southern parts of Warwickshire and Northamptonshire which are predominantly rural. Banbury's main industries are motorsport, car components, electrical goods, plastics, food processing and printing. Banbury is home to the Jacobs Douwe Egberts factory which was previously the world's largest coffee-producing facility, built in 1964. The town is famed for Banbury cakes, a spiced sweet pastry.
Banbury is located north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham, south-east of Coventry and north-northwest of Oxford.
Toponymy
The name Banbury may derive from "Banna", a Saxon chieftain said to have built a stockade there in the 6th century, and burgh / burh meaning settlement. In Anglo Saxon it was called Banesburh. The name appears as Banesberie in the Domesday Book of 1086. Another known spelling was Banesebury in medieval times.History
Archaeological evidence has been found for a British Iron Age settlement with circular buildings, dating back to 200 BC, in the Hennef Way area. Later there was a Roman villa at Wykham Park.The area was settled by the Saxons around the late 5th century. It was a local centre for Anglo-Saxon settlement by the mid-6th century. Banbury developed in the Anglo-Saxon period under Danish influence, starting in the late 6th century. It was assessed at 50 hides in the Domesday survey and was then held by the Bishop of Lincoln.
The Saxons built Banbury on the west bank of the River Cherwell. On the opposite bank they built Grimsbury, which was formerly part of Northamptonshire. Another district, Neithrop, is one of the oldest areas in Banbury, having first been recorded as a hamlet in the 13th century.
Banbury stands at the junction of two ancient roads: Salt Way, its primary use being transport of salt; and Banbury Lane, which began near Northampton and is closely followed by the modern road. It continued through what is now Banbury's High Street and towards the Fosse Way at Stow-on-the-Wold. Banbury's medieval prosperity was based on wool.
Banbury Castle was built from 1135 by Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, and survived into the Civil War in the 1640s, when it was besieged.
During the Civil War, due to its proximity to Oxford, the King's capital, Banbury was at one stage a Royalist town, but the inhabitants were known to be strongly Puritan. The town later became pro-Parliamentarian, but the castle was manned by a Royalist garrison who supported King Charles I. The Reindeer Inn was reputedly used as a base by Oliver Cromwell, particularly in preparing for the Battle of Edge Hill in 1642. In 1645, Parliamentary troops were billeted in nearby Hanwell for nine weeks and villagers petitioned the Warwickshire Committee of Accounts to pay for feeding them. The castle was demolished after the war.
File:Banbury 1.jpg|thumb|The modern Castle Quay Shopping Centre alongside the Oxford Canal, with Banbury Museum in the background
The opening of the Oxford Canal from Hawkesbury Junction to Banbury on 30 March 1778 gave the town a cheap and reliable supply of Warwickshire coal. In 1787 the Oxford Canal was extended southwards, finally opening to Oxford on 1 January 1790. The canal's main boat yard was the original outlay of today's Tooley's Boatyard. The railway reached Banbury in 1850; Merton Street station on the Buckinghamshire Railway to Bletchley opened in May 1850, followed by Bridge Street station, later renamed Banbury General, on the Great Western Railway in September 1850.
People's Park was set up as a private park in 1890 and opened in 1910, along with the adjacent bowling green.
The land south of the New Foscote Hospital in Calthorpe and Easington Farm were mostly open farmland until the early 1960s. The Ruscote estate, which now has a notable South Asian community, was expanded in the 1950s because of the growth of the town due to the London overspill and further grew in the mid-1960s.
British Railways closed Merton Street railway station and the Buckingham to Banbury line to passenger traffic at the end of 1960. Merton Street goods depot continued to handle livestock traffic for Banbury's cattle market until 1966, when this too was discontinued and the railway dismantled. In March 1962 Sir John Betjeman celebrated the line from Culworth Junction in his poem Great Central Railway, Sheffield Victoria to Banbury. British Railways closed this line too in 1966.
The main railway station, previously called Banbury General but now called simply Banbury, is now served by trains running from London Paddington via and once daily, from London Marylebone via and Bicester onwards to Birmingham and and by CrossCountry Trains from and Reading to Birmingham, Manchester and.
Banbury used to have a large cattle market. Situated on Merton Street in Grimsbury, for many decades, cattle and other farm animals were driven there on the hoof from as far as Scotland to be sold to feed the growing population of London and other towns. Since its closure in June 1998, a new housing development and Dashwood Primary School has been built on its site. The estate, which lies between Banbury and Hanwell, was built on the grounds of Hanwell Farm during 2005 and 2006.
Banburyshire
The name 'Banburyshire' is sometimes used informally to describe the area centred on Banbury, claimed to include parts of Northamptonshire and Warwickshire as well as north Oxfordshire. Use of the term dates from the early to mid 19th century. It was common in the 19th century for market towns in England to describe their hinterland by tacking "shire" onto the town's name. "Stones Map of Banburyshire" held by the Centre of Banbury Studies was published in the 1870s or 1880s and it asserted that the term originated in the 1830s but no source is given for that assertion. In the 1850s magazine articles used "Banburyshire" or the hyphenated term "Banbury-shire". The Banburyshire Natural History Society was formed in 1881.In the 20th century a number of books used the term "Banburyshire" in their titles, dating from the early 1960s.
The county of Oxfordshire has two main commercial centres, the city of Oxford itself that serves most of the south of the county, and Banbury that serves the north plus parts of the neighbouring counties of Northamptonshire and Warwickshire.
Governance
There are three tiers of local government covering Banbury, at civil parish, district, and county level: Banbury Town Council, Cherwell District Council, and Oxfordshire County Council. The town council is based at Banbury Town Hall on Bridge Street.Administrative history
Banbury was an ancient parish. The parish historically straddled the boundary between Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire, which followed the River Cherwell. The Oxfordshire part of the parish included the town itself and the hamlets of Neithrop, Calthorpe, Easington, Hardwick, and Wykham. The Northamptonshire part of the parish included the hamlets of Grimsbury and Nethercote.In 1554, Mary I issued a charter which incorporated the town as a borough. Prior to that, it had been a lower status seigneurial borough, controlled by the Bishop of Lincoln as lord of the manor. Mary's charter defined a borough boundary matching the parish, but the borough later came to be defined as a much smaller area, just covering the urban area as it then was.
From the 17th century onwards, parishes were gradually given various civil functions under the poor laws, in addition to their original ecclesiastical functions. In some cases, including Banbury, the civil functions were exercised by subdivisions of the parish rather than the parish as a whole. In Banbury's case, the parish was split into three parts for administering the poor laws: the area of the borough, the remainder of the Oxfordshire part of the parish, and the Northamptonshire part of the parish. The latter part was jointly administered with the neighbouring parish of Warkworth. In 1866, the legal definition of 'parish' was changed to be the areas used for administering the poor laws, and so the old ecclesiastical parish of Banbury diverged from the civil parishes of Banbury, Neithrop and Warkworth.
The borough was reformed to become a municipal borough in 1836 under the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, which standardised how most boroughs operated across the country. The borough's powers were primarily judicial rather than providing public services for the growing town. In order to provide services and infrastructure, the whole ecclesiastical parish of Banbury was made a local board district in 1852, with the local board being responsible for sewers, public health, and other aspects of local government. The borough corporation and the local board then existed alongside each other, with their differently defined areas and roles, until 1889.
In 1889, following the Local Government Act 1888, the Northamptonshire parts of the local board district were transferred to Oxfordshire, and the local board's functions were transferred to the borough corporation, with the borough being enlarged to cover the whole of the old local board district. The borough council met at Banbury Town Hall until 1930, when it moved its offices and meetings to the former Municipal Technical School on Marlborough Road.
The municipal borough of Banbury was abolished in 1974 under the Local Government Act 1972, with its area becoming part of the new Cherwell district.
No successor parish was created for Banbury at the time of the 1974 reforms and so it became unparished; instead, the Cherwell councillors who represented wards in Banbury acted as charter trustees to preserve the town's civic traditions, including appointing one of them to take the title of mayor each year. A number of roads are named after former mayors, including Mascord Road, Mold Crescent and Fairfax Close. A new civil parish of Banbury was created in 2000, with its parish council taking the name Banbury Town Council. Since then, the chair of the town council has taken the title of mayor.