And so the 250th anniversary year of the Covered Market draws to a close. What would John Gwynn have made of it, we wonder, as he put the final touches to his architectural designs over a quarter of a millennium ago?
Some things remain more or less the same. His fine building has stood the test of time and would still be pleasingly recognisable to him – from the outside at least. Inside, however, it’s a very different story. Change is the order of the day. BIG change.
Our previous Story about the Covered Market was first published less than five years ago. Since then several famously familiar shops have disappeared. The most notable absentee is M Feller and Daughter. Gone are its ‘haunches of venison’ and ‘rows of dangling rabbits’. (Gone, indeed, are all but one of the twenty butchers who were here when the market first opened in 1774: only David John survives.)
Photo: John Milnes / Oxford Sausage
Dearly departed in the process is the world’s oldest ham (we’re trying to find out where it currently resides.) The Wet Fish stall is no more. Neither is Blue Blood the sportwear emporium. Nor The Hat Box. Nor The Cake Shop whose magnificent icing concoctions were a window-shopper’s treat. How long is it, we wonder, before Bonners the greengrocer (a constant presence in the Covered Market since 1958) gets squeezed out by supermarket competition?
But it’s not all a tale of loss.
Coming in to join the gem that is The Teardrop microbar (and its neighbour The Market Cellar Door) are The Market Tap and Gulp Fiction. The Hamblin Bakery now entices passers-by with the smell of fresh bread and pastries. The Polish grinning gnome Życzliwek has been moved to a more prominent place. The Oxford Cobbler is still alive and cobbling. The queues round The Oxford Cheese Company show no sign of subsiding. And everything still seems to be blooming in The Oxford Garden.
The Postbox has had a fresh lick of paint and remains a beacon – albeit mostly used for the display of knitted toppers rather than the sending of letters. Alice still floats on high. And Brown’s Café has just celebrated its centenary. It remains, well, brown, and is still the best place for an unfashionably calorific breakfast.
Who knows what will hang in the windows and dangle from the rafters in another 250 years time? Perhaps there won’t even be windows or rafters, and dangling will have been banned. Of one thing we may be sure, however. For all the glitzy charms of the everywhere-and-nowhere Westgate, Oxford’s Covered Market will still be welcoming visitors from near and far to revel in its atmospheric magic.
