History of Mount Pleasant, 74–76 London Road
The land on which Mount Pleasant stands was advertised thus for sale in Jackson's Oxford Journal of 22 October 1836:
It seems likely that Mount Pleasant was built shortly after this date, while the Royal Standard to the east was built as part of New Headington village in the early 1850s.
Forat least a hundred years (until the late 1970s) Mount Pleasant was a shop on the left with a completely separate private house on the right.
Before the 1850s, the people of Quarry and Old Headington shopped in their own high streets and had no need to go further afield. Mount Pleasant was the first shop ever to open on the London Road. (The top end of New High Street was originally intended for upmarket housing, which is presumably why New Headington village’s first pub and shop were placed discreetly around the corner on the London Road.)
The 1861 census shows Saul Levi, a butcher aged 41, living in the shop on the east side of Mount Pleasant with his wife and seven children. The fifth child was born in Summertown in about 1855 and the sixth in Headington in about 1857, which suggests that Mount Pleasant was probably built in about 1856. The west side of Mount Pleasant was a private house in 1861, occupied by John Ward, a brickmaker from Quainton, with his wife, five children, and a lodger. His daughter Lettice was to become the mother of G.H. Williams who founded the cycle shop.
By the time of the 1871 censuses, the shop on the east side of Mount Pleasant had become a bootmaker’s, run by Vincent Gurden, who lived there with his wife Eliza; while in the house on the west side lived Joseph Young, a labourer, with this wife, six children, and a lodger.
In the 1881 census the shop and adjoining private house are for the first time actually named as Mount Pleasant. The shop is now a grocer’s, occupied and run by Joseph Lovatt (aged 63) from Staffordshire and his Devonshire wife, while the house on the right is occupied by John E. Swithinbank of Leeds (a student of the University of Oxford aged 30), his wife, baby daughter, and a 13-year-old servant girl.
By the time of the 1891 census, the Lovatt family had also taken over the private house to the right: John Lovatt, the carpenter aged 38 born in Staffordshire who is living there is probably the son of Joseph, aged 74, who lived in the shop on the left. The Lovatt family continued to occupy the both halves of Mount Pleasant until 1935, and then just the house on the right until the mid-1960s.
In the 1920s Mount Pleasant was numbered 10 & 12 London Road, but the growth of central Headington around this time meant that the whole road had to be renumbered, and Mount Pleasant is first listed in Kelly’s Directory with its present numbering (74 and 76 London Road) in 1934.
John Lovatt junior was a boot repairer at the shop from the 1920s, while Francis Lovatt occupied the private house on the right from 1932 to 1962. John appears to have moved in with Francis in the house on the right in the mid-1930s, and a Mrs S. A. Brownsill opened a short-lived draper’s shop at No. 76 on the left.
By 1941, the shop had been taken over by Mrs Mary T. Chaundy as a confectioner’s, while. John Lovatt was operating as a boot repairer at 76A (presumably upstairs). By 1949, Mrs Chaundy had also taken over 76A for selling toys. She continued as a confectioner and toy dealer at Mount Pleasant until her death in 1963, and during this period it was home to one of Headington’s more unusual health establishments, the dolls' hospital.
Her husband, John Reginald Chaundy, kept the shop on until the late 1970s as just a confectioner’s, although he himself worked at a typewriter shop at the Plain. In the early 1980s both the shop and the private house on the right were bought by the present owners, the Papamichaels, who have run Mount Pleasant as a hotel and restaurant since that date.