The annual brain drain from Abingdon has just happened with some of Abingdon’s brightest going

to Aberdeen
to Abertay
to Aberystwyth
to Aston
to Bangor
to Bath
to Belfast
to Birmingham
to Bolton
to Bournemouth
to Bradford
to Brighton
to Bristol
to Brunel
to Buckingham
to Cambridge
to Canterbury
to Cardiff
to Carlisle
to Cheltenham
to Chester
to Colchester
to Coventry
to Cranfield
to Derby
to Dundee
to Durham
to Edinburgh
to Exeter
to Glasgow
to Guildford
to Hatfield
to Huddersfield
to Hull
to Inverness
to Keele
to Lampeter
to Lancaster
to Leeds
to Leicester
to Lincoln
to Liverpool
to London
to Loughborough
to Luton
to Manchester
to Milton Keynes
to Newcastle
to Newport
to Northampton
to Norwich
to Nottingham
to Oxford
to Paisley
to Plymouth
to Pontypridd
to Portsmouth
to Preston
to Reading
to Salford
to Sheffield
to Slough
to Southampton
to St.Andrews
to Staffordshire
to Stirling
to Sunderland
to Swansea
to Teesside
to Ulster
to Warwick
to Winchester
to Wolverhampton
to Worcester
to York

and possibly further field. This year for the first time they are having to pay £3,000 a year University tuition fees. Last year it was £1,000.

And here is one of the many young Abingdonians looking out of the bedroom window from the University Hall of Residence for the first time. Freshers often get into Halls, but then have to find their own accomodation in the following years.

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:

• 1980s. Gateway acquire Keymarkets, Lennons, International Stores, Fine Fare and Carrefour Hypermarkets.
• 1994. Gateway renamed as Somerfield.
• 1998. Somerfield acquire Kwik Save.
• 2000. Somerfield sell off larger stores.
• 2004. Somerfield acquire 100+ Safeway stores
• 2005. Somerfield acquired by a consortium
• 2006. Somerfield sell off Kwik Save.
• 2006. Somerfield sell off underperforming stores (including some Kwik Saves that had been rebranded as Somerfields but only a sign and a splash of paint).

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.