Cornmarket was semi-pedestrianised and made a limited-access street in 1999. Cycling is allowed 6pm to 10am. In 2002, it was voted Britain's second worst street in a poll of listeners to the Today programme.[3] The rating was largely due to a failed attempt to repave the street in 2001. The granite setts, which had been laid extensively, cracked and the contractor went into liquidation. In 2003, it was repaved again and new benches installed, amidst reports of budgetary problems.
History of shops
26–27 Cornmarket Street, a 14th century building, former location of Zac's, and now a Pret a Manger sandwich shop[4]
26–28 Cornmarket on the corner of Ship Street is a 14th-century timber-framed building.[5] It is the surviving half of a building completed in about 1386 as the New Inn.[5] It belongs to Jesus College and was investigated and restored in 1983.[6]
Boswells of Oxford established what was 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 retained an entrance on Cornmarket Street. The store closed in 2020
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.
Zac's was a waterproof clothing manufacturing and retail firm based at 26–27 Cornmarket, established in the 1880s and closed in 1983.[7][2]
Woolworth's bought the Clarendon Hotel on the west side of the street in 1939 with the intention of demolishing it for the construction of a new store on the site.[8] 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.[9]Thomas Sharp, in Oxford Replanned (1948) a report commissioned by Oxford City Council, warned that Oxford was already short of quality hotel accommodation and the Clarendon's demolition would be a mistake.[8] Notwithstanding Sharp's conclusions, Woolworth's demolished the hotel in 1954–55.[10] 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.[11]
