History of Shops
26–28 Cornmarket on the corner of Ship Street is a 14th century timber-framed building. It is the surviving half of a building completed in about 1386 as the New Inn. It belongs to Jesus College, Oxford and was investigated and restored in 1983.
Boswells of Oxford established what is now the largest department store in Oxford at 50 Cornmarket Street in 1738. In 1928 the shop opened a new main entrance on Broad Street, but it still retains an entrance on Cornmarket Street.
The Victorian photographer Henry Taunt set up a shop at 33 Cornmarket Street in 1869. It was a small shop and in 1874 he moved to larger premises in Broad Street.
Woolworth's bought the historic Clarendon Hotel on the west side of the street in 1939 to demolish it and build a new store on the site. Thomas Sharp, in his report Oxford Replanned for Oxford City Council, warned that Oxford was already short of quality hotel accommodation and the Clarendon's demolition would be a mistake. Notwithstanding Sharp's advice, Woolworth's demolished the hotel in 1954–55. In earlier centuries the Clarendon had been the Star Inn. It was a complex of 16th and 17th century buildings, one of which had a vaulted Norman cellar dating from the second half of the 12th century: possibly the oldest vaulted structure in Oxford. After demolition of all the buildings above the surface, parts of the 12th century vault were destroyed to make way for one of the columns of Clarendon House built in its place.
Clarendon House was designed by William Holford and built in 1956–57. The facade is of coursed and squared rubble masonry with panels of blue-green slate, and Nikolaus Pevsner commended the building as tactful and elegant. The building is now part of the Clarendon Shopping Centre.
Read more about this topic: Cornmarket Street
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or shops:
“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust,... confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)