Wykham Park Farm Shop
The farm shop you hope exists near every holiday cottage: everything grown, reared or made on the farm itself.
The farm shop you hope exists near every holiday cottage: everything grown, reared or made on the farm itself.
Wykham Park is a working farm on the edge of Banbury, and the shop is honest about it. This is the place we go when we want to cook something properly at the cottage rather than throw a supermarket meal deal in the oven. The vegetables come out of their own fields, the meat comes off their own land, and the difference is obvious the moment you get it home. It takes us around twenty-five minutes from the cottage, up the A361 towards Banbury, and it is the sort of drive you make on purpose rather than resent.
What sets a farm shop like this apart from the M&S or the big Sainsbury's is that so much of it is grown, reared or made a few yards from where you pick it up. There is no lifestyle branding and no inflated theatre, just good produce sold by the people who produced it. For a self-catering week it changes the whole rhythm of cooking: you plan the meals around what looks best on the day rather than around a shopping list.
The seasons genuinely drive what is on the shelves here. In late spring the asparagus is the headline act, cut from their own beds by the tonne, and the summer brings a run of fruit and veg that is hard to beat for a garden supper. The butchery counter is the other reason to make the trip: their own Longhorn beef and lamb are reared on the farm and cut in the shop, so a Sunday roast bought here has a provenance you can actually point to on the way past. Alongside the fresh produce there is a Larder of store-cupboard bits and a Kitchen turning out prepared food for the nights you would rather not start from scratch.
We tend to treat Wykham Park as the destination shop rather than the top-up. The plan is usually a joint or some chops from the butchery for one proper dinner, a board from the cheese counter, and whatever the fields are giving that week to go around it. For the everyday basics and the first-morning breakfast we lean on the supermarkets in Chipping Norton, then come here when we want the cooking to feel like part of the holiday. It is a short hop off the main road, so it slots easily onto the end of a day out towards Banbury or a visit to nearby Diddly Squat Farm Shop.
If you are building a week of good eating, Wykham Park sits in fine company. Daylesford is the grand organic farm shop to the west and worth a morning in its own right; Worton Kitchen Garden is a lovely walled-garden spot near Cassington; and Eagles Fine Foods is the deli to know in Chipping Norton for cheese, charcuterie and the odd treat. For the full picture, our guide to eating and drinking in the area runs from village pubs to farm shops and everything in between.
“We never drive past without calling in. A joint from the butchery and something off the cheese counter, and somehow we always leave with a full boot.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.