37: Frederick Tranter
No. 37 is on the left-hand side of a pair of houses dating from the sixteenth or early seventeenth century.
The oriel windows in the gables are supported by seventeenth-century brackets, and even the barge-board above the windows dates from the seventeenth century. It is a Grade II listed building (ref. 1485/354).
This pair of shops, which is on the site of a fourteenth-century hall, was bought from Magdalen College by The Queen’s College in 1709 but in the end was not used in the redevelopment of Queen’s front quad.
In 1772 a survey of every house in the city was taken in consequence of the Mileways Act of 1771. According to Salter, No. 37 was then in the occupation of a Mr Taylor, and its frontage measured 4 yards 2 feet 8 inches.
At the time of the 1851 census Joseph Abrams, the bookseller here, lived over the shop with his wife and four daughters.
This then became an engraver’s shop. In 1861 Mrs Eliza Clements, the proprietor of this shop after the death of her husband, lived here with her son John, who was an engraver and printer, her two daughters, and two lodgers. In 1881 Mrs Clements was still living upstairs, at the age of 83, with her unmarried daughter of 60, Miss Eliza Clements and her granddaughter Adeline Mary Clements. Miss Clements then kept a lodging house upstairs until well into the twentieth century.
| Occupiers of 37 High Street | |
| 1839 | Elizabeth Eaglestone Milliner & Dressmaker |
| 1846–1851 | Joseph Abrams Bookseller |
| 1852 | John Stevens Hatter |
| 1861–1876 | John Clements [Mrs Clements from 1872] Engraver – Upstairs: J. W. Wylie, Watchmaker |
| 1882–1993+ | John Rogers Watchmaker & engraver [later Jeweller] |
| By 1996–1999 | Avery Pipes Tobacconist |
| 1999–present | Frederick Tranter Tobacconist |