Barton Road, Headington
The first council houses in Oxford were built in Headington in 1925, and the above postcard celebrates this event. It shows the London Road looking west, with the newly-created Barton Road on the right.
The large corner house on the right is 249 London Road.
The buildings shown in this postcard were praised by John Betjeman as a "neat council house scheme". It was, however, very small compared with what was to come after 1946, when 1,600 council houses were built in Barton.
The development of Barton Road marks the first phase of the division of the hamlet of Barton from its mother village of Old Headington. Formerly its inhabitants would have walked along Barton Lane to Old Headington to shop. Now they had a new route (replacing the former muddy track) leading straight up to the London Road and the grocer’s shop at 301.
Barton was soon to be severed completely by Oxford’s first section of ring-road (the northern bypass, built from Headington roundabout to the Banbury Road roundabout in the mid-1930s).