Attractions and Places To See around Souldern - Top 20

A beautiful park with an obelisk as the centrefold, built in 2012 to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

If you know the English novelist Flora Thompson, you may enjoy this stop at her childhood home.

At one time Banbury had many crosses (the High Cross, the Bread Cross and the White Cross), but these were destroyed by Puritans in 1600.[7][50] Banbury remained without a cross for more than 250 years until the current Banbury Cross was erected in 1859 at the centre of the town to commemorate the marriage of Victoria, Princess Royal (eldest child of Queen Victoria) to Prince Frederick of Prussia. The current Banbury Cross is a stone, spire-shaped monument decorated in Gothic form. Statues of Queen Victoria, Edward VII and George V were added in 1914 to commemorate the coronation of George V. The cross is 52 feet 6 inches (16 m) high, and topped by a gilt cross. Towns with crosses in England before the reformation were places of Christian pilgrimage. The English nursery rhyme "Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross", in its several forms, may refer to one of the crosses destroyed by Puritans in 1600.[50] In April 2005, Princess Anne unveiled a large bronze statue depicting the Fine Lady upon a White Horse of the nursery rhyme.[51] It stands on the corner of West Bar and South Bar, just yards from the present Banbury Cross. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banbury#Banbury_Cross)

This building, designed by Edward George Bruton in the Gothic Revival style and built by Chesterman Brothers of Abingdon, was completed in October 1854 and is the fourth town hall building built in Banbury town from 1590 onwards. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with three bays facing the junction of the High Street and Market Place; the central section, which projected forward, featured an arched doorway on the ground floor and a balcony with an ogee headed window on the first floor. A clock tower and spire were added in 1860. The principal room was an assembly hall on the first floor. The building was extended to the south west to create a council chamber in 1891. The town hall was the headquarters of Banbury Borough Council until the council moved its administration to the mechanics' institute in Marlborough Road in 1930. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banbury_Town_Hall

Flora Thompson (née Timms) (1876 – 1947) was a self-taught English novelist, who wrote about the decay of Victorian agrarian England. She is best known for her semi-autobiographical trilogy "Lark Rise to Candleford". "Laura's parents ... thought the house was well worth the rent, for it was two small thatched cottages made into one, with two bedrooms and a good garden. Of course, as they said, it had not the conveniences of a town house. Until they themselves had bought an oven grate and put it in the second cottage downstairs room, known as 'the wash-house', there was nowhere to bake the Sunday joint, and it was tiresome to have to draw water up from a well and irritating in wet weather to have to walk under an umbrella half way down the garden to the earth closet. But the cottage living-room was a pleasant place, with its well-polished furniture, shelves of bright crockery, and red-and-black rugs laid down to 'take the tread' on the raddled tile floor. In summer the window stood permanently open and hollyhocks and other tall flowers would push their way in and mingle with the geraniums and fuchsias on the window-sill. This room was the children's nursery ... [and ] had one advantage over most nurseries. The door opened straight out on to the garden path and in fine weather the children were allowed to run in and out as they would. Even when it rained and a board was slipped, country fashion, into grooves in the doorposts to keep them in, they could still lean out over it and feel the rain splash on their hands and see the birds flicking their wings in the puddles and smell the flowers and wet earth while they sang: 'Rain, rain, go away, Come again another day.'" From Flora Thompson's "Lark Rise to Candleford"

Designed by Edward Bruton in 1854, Banbury Town Hall is a magnificent Gothic-style building in the town centre. It was once used as a police station and cells still exist in the building. However, the prisoners are gone today and the town hall is now used for weddings and conferences.

Flora Thompson (5 December 1876 – 21 May 1947) was an English novelist and poet best known for her semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford. Verse Bog Myrtle and Peat (1921) Novels Lark Rise (1939) Over to Candleford (1941) Candleford Green (1943) Lark Rise to Candleford (1945, the above three novels published as a trilogy) Still Glides the Stream (1948, published posthumously) Heatherley (1944, published posthumously first in A Country Calendar 1979 along with some Peverel Papers and some poems; then as a single volume in 1998) Gates of Eden (serialised in The Peverel Monthly edited by Thompson in the late 1920s but never published as a separate volume) Dashpers (unfinished, unpublished novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_Thompson

Tusmore House in Oxfordshire, built for Wafic Said, the Syrian-born millionaire, has been declared the best new building in the classical tradition at the annual Georgian Group awards. The house is on the scale of the great houses of the 18th century. Its portico of solid stone rivals that of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London. The quality of the scagliola columns in the central rotunda has been compared with the finest craftsmanship of the imperial palaces of St Petersburg. The owner and architects refused to be drawn on costs but the house has been valued at £35 million. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1475634/The-English-country-house-rises-once-more.html