History of Walker’s furniture shop
71 London Road
The house lurking behind the modern ground-floor frontage of Starbucks and Project X was probably built around 1926. Charles Walker is first listed as a furniture dealer on the London Road in 1927, and he both lived and worked in this house. The projecting ground-floor frontage and raised part of the pavement were once the front garden of the house, although doubtless Walker used part of the area to display his wares.
The furniture trade in Headington would have been booming at this time, as Headington was about to be absorbed as a suburb of Oxford and heavily developed. Three nearby roads were built up in the late 1920s: Osler Road, Old High Street, and Kennett Road.
By 1929 Walker’s listing in Kelly’s Directory reads: "Walker’s Furnishing Stores (Charles Walker), house furnishers, London road. Tel. No. Headington 6880." The 1930 directory confirms that this was the above shop, then an unnumbered new building between the old numbers 9 and 11.
The advertisement on the right is from Kelly’s Directory of 1933.
The advertisement on the left is from Kelly’s Directory of 1947, and shows that for a time Walker’s baby and children’s department was in a separate shop at 65 London Road (now the Sun-Kissed Tanning Salon).
Walker continued to live over his shop until the 1970s, when presumably he died.
The firm that Walker had founded in 1929 continued at the shop after his death. An advertisement in the Yellow Pages for 1984 reads: "Walkers of Headington Home Furnishers, Furniture & Beds Plus, Fitted kitchen studio, Hotpoint Centre, Fitted carpets, Gifts & Lighting". Walker’s of Headington is last listed at 71 London Road in the telephone directory of 1990, and from 1991 is listed at 33 Lime Walk.
Another furniture firm operated from this shop in the 1990s, and in about 2000, Pronuptia moved here from its former premises in New Inn Hall Street, Oxford.
