Banbury Museum & Gallery
A free, relaxed canalside museum in Banbury, with touring exhibitions that give you reason to return.
A free, relaxed canalside museum in Banbury, with touring exhibitions that give you reason to return.
Some days the Cotswold weather simply refuses to cooperate, and this is the place we point people towards when it does. Banbury Museum & Gallery sits on Spiceball Park Road, tucked into the canalside development at the heart of town, and it is genuinely free to walk into. Twenty minutes from the cottage door, with a covered car park a few steps away, it turns a washed-out afternoon into something the whole family is glad they did.
What surprises most people is how much history a compact museum manages to hold. The permanent galleries tell the story of Banbury and its waterways, and they cover a lot of ground: the English Civil War, the plush-weaving trade that once clothed half of Europe, the town's Victorian heyday as a market centre, and costume that runs from the seventeenth century right up to the present day. It is the kind of place where you drift from case to case for an hour without noticing the time, then step back out onto the towpath with a better sense of the town you have been driving through all week. The plush-weaving story in particular tends to catch people out; few realise Banbury built a whole industry on a fabric most of us have never heard of.
It works on its own, and it works even better as one stop in a wider wander around Banbury. We tend to fold it into a morning that takes in the market, a coffee on Parsons Street and a lap of the canal, then finish with the museum when legs (or patience) start to flag. Here is what makes it an easy call:
The permanent collection is the anchor, but the changing exhibitions are the reason we check the website before we set off. The Pye Gallery runs a rolling programme that has ranged from Grayson Perry to Vikings, Turner to Lego, so there is nearly always a reason to go back even if you visited last season. Because the line-up rotates, it is worth a quick look at what is on before you drive over. We have caught everything from big travelling shows to smaller local displays up there, and the free entry makes it an easy detour even when you only have half an hour to spare. It is also the part of the visit that changes most between trips, which is what keeps the museum on our list rather than a one-off.
Banbury is an easy twenty-minute run from the cottage, mostly along the A4260, and the museum sits right in the middle of it. The covered car park at Castle Quay drops you a couple of minutes from the door, which is exactly what you want when the rain is coming sideways. Round the visit off with a coffee and a genuine Banbury cake, and if the weather lifts you are only a short drive from a couple of the area's best castles. For the fuller picture of what to see, our things to do guide lays out the days out we recommend most, and the Banbury town guide covers where to eat and park while you are there.
“We always check what's on at the gallery before heading into Banbury. It's free, it's right by the canal, and the touring shows are surprisingly good.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.