History of Smart’s fish & chip shop
81A London Road
There were no shops on the north side of the London Road between Osler Road and Stephen Road in 1921, as the map of that year (left) shows. Headington House had just sold its land to the south of Cuckoo Lane and Stephen Road was laid out but not built up. The only building in this area is the south lodge of Headington House, sitting in a trapeze-shaped piece of land.
The area each on side of "Park Lodge" was developed with shops in the 1920s and early 1930s, and in 1933 the London Road was renumbered.
Then in 1937 the lodge itself was demolished, and four new shops were slotted in the gap between 79 and 81 London Road: see the 1939 map (right).
These new shops upset the sequence of numbering on the London Road. The first three new shops were numbered 79A, 79B, and 79C, and this one (the only one that survived into the twenty-first century), was numbered 81A. The numbering of the London Road remains erratic at this point until today, and this shop is sometimes wrongly numbered 81.
From 1938 to at least 1949, No. 81A was occupied by Thomas Jarvis, gents' outfitter.
By 1952 it was "Jarvis" (D.L. & N.E. Payne, proprs.), men’s & boys' wear, and this company remained in the shop until 1958.
There is no listing in Kelly’s Directory for 1960, then from 1962 to 1976 J.R. Lane Ltd outfitters, a chain with branches all over Oxford, is listed here.
In the early 1980s it became a fish & chip shop, and was Smart’s Fish & Chips fromm at least 1993 until its closure in 2007.
In August 2007 a planning application (07/01883/FUL) was submitted to demolish this two-storey building and replace it with a four-storey one comprising a Class A3 (café) unit rather than an A5 (takeway) one on the ground floor, and three flats over the first, second, and third floors.