Cornmarket Street

Cornmarket is a long, straight pedestrian street paved in pale stone, lined with brick-and-stone shopfronts, and marked at its northern end by the Saxon tower of Saint Michael at the North Gate.

This is Oxford’s main shopping street, known simply as The Corn, running north to south between Magdalen Street and Carfax Tower. It looks ordinary enough for a place where people buy socks and sandwiches... but Oxford rarely leaves anything pleasantly simple for long.

In two thousand and two, a radio poll voted Cornmarket the second worst street in Britain. The reason was not some grand moral collapse. It was paving. In two thousand and one, workers laid granite setts - small rectangular paving stones - across much of the street. They cracked, the contractor went bust, and the city had to repave the whole thing again in two thousand and three, adding benches while wrestling with budget trouble. Urban drama, Oxford style.

If you glance at your screen, there’s a useful older view from Carfax that shows Cornmarket before those later fixes. And near Ship Street, another image picks out one of the real survivors here: the New Inn at twenty-six to twenty-eight Cornmarket. That timber-framed building dates to about thirteen eighty-six, though only half of it survives now. Jesus College owns it, and specialists restored it in nineteen eighty-three.

Cornmarket also carries a trail of vanished businesses. Boswells opened here in seventeen thirty-eight and grew into Oxford’s biggest department store before closing in twenty twenty. Photographer Henry Taunt started at number thirty-three in eighteen sixty-nine before moving to Broad Street. Zac’s sold waterproof clothing from the eighteen eighties until nineteen eighty-three... which feels very sensible in England.

On the west side, Woolworths bought the old Clarendon Hotel in nineteen thirty-nine and eventually demolished it in the nineteen fifties, despite warnings from planner Thomas Sharp. Worse, builders destroyed part of its twelfth-century vaulted cellar - an underground room with a curved stone ceiling - to fit a column for Clarendon House.

Cornmarket turns Oxford into a running argument between old stone and new money. When you’re ready, head east through Golden Cross toward the Covered Market.