Banbury
A busy market town on the River Cherwell, with its famous cross, a canalside quarter and one of north Oxfordshire's best markets.
A busy market town on the River Cherwell, with its famous cross, a canalside quarter and one of north Oxfordshire's best markets.
Banbury is where we go when the honey-stone villages around the cottage can't quite provide what we need. It is a working Oxfordshire market town rather than a chocolate-box one, and we mean that as a compliment: it is busy, practical and genuinely useful, the place for a proper shop, a haircut, a click-and-collect or an hour out of the rain with the children. About twenty-five minutes from Well Cottage, close enough that we think nothing of nipping in for the morning and back for lunch, it fills the gap between our beautiful but very small local villages and a full day out in Oxford.
Most people know Banbury before they ever visit it, thanks to the nursery rhyme. The Banbury Cross of "ride a cock horse" really does stand at the top of the town, on the spot where the old roads met, though the present cross is Victorian: it was put up in 1859 to mark the marriage of Queen Victoria's eldest daughter. There has been a market here since the Middle Ages, and the Charter Market still fills the Market Place every Thursday and Saturday with stalls of fruit and veg, plants, clothes and household bits. It is not smart, but it is cheerful and good value, and a lap of it is a nice way to feel the pulse of the town.
The heart of the shopping is Castle Quay, a covered centre right beside the Oxford Canal with the familiar high-street names under one roof, which is exactly what you want on a wet afternoon. The newer Castle Quay Waterfront, opened in 2022, added a run of canalside restaurants and a cinema, so it doubles as an easy evening out. What lifts it above an ordinary shopping trip is the water: narrowboats work up and down the canal right past the terraces, and the towpath gives you a flat, pram-friendly walk if you want to stretch your legs between shops. We tend to park at Castle Quay and do everything on foot from there.
If you have an hour and some weather to escape, the Banbury Museum & Gallery is the reliable answer. Entry is free, the way into it is through Castle Quay, and it tells the story of the town and the canal that made it. Alongside sits Tooley's Boatyard, one of the oldest working dry docks in the country, still repairing narrowboats as it has for more than two hundred years. Between the galleries, the towpath and the boats coming through the lock, it is a good, low-effort morning that keeps everyone happy and costs almost nothing.
The town has its own cake, and it is worth knowing about. A Banbury cake is a flat, oval, spiced pastry filled with currants and mixed peel, a cousin of the Eccles cake, and it has been made here to closely guarded recipes since the sixteenth century. It is the kind of small, specific thing that makes a place feel like itself, and picking a couple up to eat by the canal is a nicer souvenir than anything you will find in the shopping centre.
Banbury also works well as a base for a bigger day out, because some of the best houses and gardens in the area sit just outside it. Broughton Castle, the moated home of the family said to have inspired the "fine lady" of the rhyme, is only a few minutes to the south-west; the terraced Broughton Grange gardens are close by; and the National Trust's Upton House & Gardens, with its picture collection and 1930s interiors, lies a short drive north. Do the shopping first, then let the countryside do the rest of the day.
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.