Banbury, Oxfordshire

 

Things like dips and feed

I remember when visiting Banbury many years ago as a teenager that I was struck by a shop with an abundance of painted signage on the upper floors. Back then, I’d never seen a building with so much writing on it. Even now, I’ve seen few to rival it, all repainted and spick and span as it is. Was it still functioning as a seed and forage merchant when I first saw it in the late-1960s? And what was its history?

Looking online, I drew a blank at first, but then I caught a glimpse of a name…which rapidly disappeared behind another screenful of information. The name was Lamprey. Surely this was the word I saw on the shop long ago, a name that reminded me then not of agricultural suppliers but of eels slithering along in the River Severn, near where I lived. And yes, Lamprey’s were in business in the late-1960s, and were using a mill on another site as a warehouse in 1969.*

So Lamprey was the name, John Lamprey and his son William, who were supplying a large hinterland of farmers who needed seed, animal fodder, and the like. Perhaps they had a rep who travelled around the farms, like the speaker in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Livings’ (‘I deal with farmers, things like dips and feed’). Banbury was an agricultural centre, and Banbury market became one of the largest livestock markets† in the country. This building is at one end of the market place, an ideal position. But the Lampreys did not stop at dealing in seed and feed. As their building’s inscriptions proclaim, they were also coal merchants. They had lime kilns near the canal, hence ‘LIME’ among the repainted ghost signs on the wall. They had a brickworks nearby too. They must have been Victorian go-getters, keen to be involved in any business that would make them money, whether related to the burgeoning building trades or to the prevailing agricultural markets. Their wall of advertising suggests they weren’t about to let anyone forget what could be bought from their premises.

From memory, the painted signs were rather worn when I first saw them. Clearly they have been repainted recently, and have come up looking fresh without losing all of their character, with the widths of the letters adjusted freely so that the words fit between the windows. Not quite genuine ghost signs, left faded but old, but still a lively bit of townscape that helps remind us of what this place was like once. The kind of agribusiness I could buy into. It’s gone now, and the building is occupied by very different concerns – a recruitment firm and an estate agency. I’m not sure how long the seed and feed business lasted, but, to paeraphrase Philip Larkin, perhaps it was time for change, in nineteen sixty-nine.¶

- - - - -   

* I’m indebted for this information to an article posted by the Banbury Museum, here. 

† Perhaps the largest.

¶ See ‘Livings’ in Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber and The Marvell Press, 1988)