History of the grocer’s shop at 21 Windsor Street
This house at 21 Windsor Street is older than it looks: it was built in 1852 and was a grocer’s shop serving the "Square" (the network of streets to the south of Bateman Street) until the 1970s.
William Mead Warner, who bought the land to create New Headington village, sold the plot for this house to a carpenter, William Wheeler, on 8 November 1851. Measuring 72 feet by 30 feet, it cost a mere £7 15s., and Wheeler took out a mortgage of £75 (to be repaid over seven years by 84 monthly payments of £1 2s. 11d.) to build a house. He had two other cottages in New Headington village, and it is uncertain whether he lived here or let it out. He continued working as a carpenter until he died on 15 March 1872.
In April 1872 George Jacobs, a mason who lived in Silman’s Row (later known as Mattock’s Row, now the south side of Wilberforce Street) took out a mortgage for £85 to buy 21 Windsor Street, where he started a shop. Although George himself is listed as "Grocer &c." in directories from 1875 to 1886, he continued his job as a stonemason, and it is evident that his wife, who is listed in the 1881 census as a shopkeeper, did most of the work, and in addition ran the New Headington soup kitchen from the shop. She continued as shopkeeper after George’s death: the 1901 census still describes her as a grocer at the age of 73. She retired in 1904 at the age of 76.
Joseph Draper, who already had a grocer’s shop on the corner of Lime Walk and All Saints Road, bought the house from her for £180 in April 1904 and sold it at a profit just five months later for £190 to Stanley Dearlove, who became the new grocer there. In July 1908 Dearlove sold it for the same price to Thomas Arnold Soanes Taylor. For some reason the next year Taylor sold the house to Mrs Sarah Jane Carter, although remaining there as a tenant until 1912. He is described in directories as a carpenter and shopkeeper: again, his wife probably actually did most of the work in the shop.
Mrs Carter’s next tenant in 1912 was John Vyles, a gardener, and in February 1916 he bought the shop off his landlady for £210. He died in 1925, but his wife, Mrs Ada Vyles, continued to run the shop until 1949, and then closed the shop and lived privately in the house until the late 1960s. It was sold for £1,350 in 1970.