There was a post about Abingdon Road in Oxford and another about Oxford Road in Abingdon but there is a place where Abingdon Road meets Oxford Road….. And this is not like the Zen koan about what is the sound of one hand clapping…
You don’t have to achieve enlightenment to answer this one. Here it is….
The Oxford Road goes off to your Left (one-way) and the Abingdon Road comes down to your right (0ne-way).
But where is it?
A moment of nostalgia with this picture from November 2004. It was taken at a time when every fifth or sixth car on the road was still a Rover, and the old Co-op had a poster promising “Somerfield Tokens accepted in this store today.”
Rover Group were living on the never never and were to go bankrupt early in 2005. At about the same time the old Co-op building was demolished.
The Somerfield supermarket has made less headlines than the Co-op. I do remember Gateway Foodstore being renamed as Somerfield. More recently Somerfield were the first supermarket I noticed giving out biodegradable carrier bags. Their SaverCard was stange, only SaverCard owners got most of the discount offers ( and some people got a SaverCard every time they shopped to get the discount).
Last year Somerfield was taken over by a consortium that has tried to simplify the business. It got rid of the SaverCard, and rebranded the Somerfield brand range as ‘Simply Value’, and relaunched the website shown here.
Here is the Belsky Mother and Child statue with Somerfields of Abingdon in the background. The shop carries on regardless, while elsewhere in the Somerfield company great mergers and sell-offs have happened:
A hundred years ago this bank (at 11 Market Place) would have had the Corn Exchange as a near neighbour to the right, and above the doorway, the word BANK was engraved in stone. The building is still a bank but it has no Corn Exchange and has probably undergone a number of changes as little banks became bigger banks. There was once an Abingdon Bank which issued its own notes.
This building now stands tall as the NatWest bank. The Natwest came into being in 1968 when the National Provincial Bank and Westminster Bank merged. The NatWest has since been taken over, in 1999, by the Royal Bank of Scotland.
On Sunday morning when not many people were about, a crane was lowering some building supplies onto the roof. It is yet another building with scaffolding and work being done.
Currently you’ll see taxis trying to park in front of the NatWest in the early evening, and people stop on the corner to nip out and use one of the two cash machines. That corner can become quite a squeeze.
With the crane it was impassable.
The first picture is of the Foxy Lady knitting display in Masons on Stert Street. There is a notice advertising a beginners knitting course. But there is also a reflection of the de paauw shop over the road.
Across the road to de paauw (Dutch for Peacock and quite a common name in Holland) where designer children’s wear is on show. The shop was opened earlier this year by a lady with de-Paauw in her name.
A few doors up is a display of second hand musical instruments in the Oxfam window. The back reflection from Prices the Stationers makes the picture looks a bit like a Picasso collage with bits of musical insrument all mixed up with the reflection. As well as the guitar and violin is a concertina and zither.
Lastly (and there are lots more interesting windows to choose from in Stert Street) is the Finishing Touch with autumnal colours.