How to research an Oxford street
Tracing the history of a street is like tracing a family tree: the only sure way is to work is backwards from the known to the unknown. This way, you will soon see if any of the house numbers have changed over the years. Even streets which appear to have the same numbering system as they did in the 1840s have anomalies where the layout of buildings has been rejigged. And although the way the street is numbered will give you a useful pointer, some roads were renumbered at least three times in the twentieth century.
Remember that areas such as Headington and Cowley which are now suburbs were not part of Oxford until 1929. And even St Clement’s did not become part of Oxford until 1835
Online databases viewable from your own computer
Some of these links provide all the information you need on screen; but even those that only give an index can be helpful.
- Historical Directories The most important thing to do when starting to research a street is to get hold of old street directories, and although you will eventually need to see every directory, printing off the years available here will give you a good start
- Oxfordshire Heritage search This enables you to search the Oxfordshire Photographic Archive by street. Following businesses and people who occupied the houses also helps you to understand a street, and this search also includes the Oxfordshire History Centre Business and People indexes (the names of Oxfordshire businesses and people compiled from local newspapers 1800–2006).
- Oxford Journal Illustrated photo index 1912–1928
- Jackson’s Oxford Journal name index 1791–1800
- Jackson’s Oxford Journal place index 1791–1800
- Oxfordshire sales catalogues 1982–2006
- Oxfordshire Buildings Index
- Oxoniensia This online journal on the architecture, archaeology, and history of Oxford and Oxfordshire has a search function, so it is well worth taking a look
- Newspapers: If you have your Oxfordshire County Council library card number to hand, you can log into www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/referenceonline and search the British Library’s copies of Jackson’s Oxford Journal from 1800 to 1900 at home (but note that a few editions are missing). For recent news, the Oxford Mail searchable archive can be very useful,and although it only goes back to 1998 it can solve some mysteries.
- Free BMD Indexes all births, marriages, and deaths in the UK between 1837 and the present date: entries virtually complete up to 1931. Useful for determining when people moved in and out of registration districts
- Listed buildings can be searched for by city and street on the Listed Buildings online website (necessary to register first)
- You may find pictures of your street on the English Heritage site. (Make sure that you put only the name of the street in the top box, and “Oxford” in the placename box, otherwise you will get no results.)
- Oxford City Council’s Planning applications online is surprisingly useful for understanding what happened to buildings in the second half of the twentieth century, and for filling the gap between the last Kelly’s Directory in 1976 and the present.
- The National Archives’ documents on line has PCC Wills and other useful information available for purchase (but sometimes you can get the basic information you need just by looking at the index)
Oxfordshire History Centre
www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/oxfordshirehistory
This new research centre in Cowley combines the Oxfordshire Record Office and former Centre for Oxfordshire Studies. (Although there are some duplicate secondary sources remaining on the top floor of the Westgate Library, they are very scanty.) The new Centre includes the following:
- Maps There are Ordnance Survey maps from 1876 to 1939 detailed enough to show every building in Oxford. You can download these on to a memory stick and crop and print off the street you are studying, and then it is easy to walk along the street and mark all the house numbers you are sure about. Enclosure award maps are also extremely useful, as many streets still follow the lines of the awards
- Street directories including Kelly’s It is advisable to photocopy your street’s entry from every available directory published since the street was numbered (namely 1846 to 1976). (Copying a directory for every five or ten years just doesn’t work; but of course you can avoid all this photocopying if you are able to do all your work at the Centre.) There are also earlier directories that include Oxford from 1841 in the county directory section where you will find the houses listed alphabetically under the inhabitants, and with house numbers. Before the penny post in 1840, very few streets were numbered; and villages such as Headington and Cowley that later became suburbs were not properly numbered until 1930.
- Censuses FindMyPast and Ancestry (including the censuses of 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, and 1911) are all available on computer (also at the central library).
- Telephone directories For the period from 1976 to the present, you may be able to get some help from old Oxford telephone directories. Don’t ignore this period as being too recent and uninteresting — the ending of Kelly’s Directory in 1976 means that this period will be hard for future researchers to study, and you will be able to add details from your own memory of shops etc. (These telephone directories go back to the nineteenth century, but before the 1970s so few people had telephones that they will not necessarily be useful.)
- Salter’s books Once you have got back to 1841, two books by H. E. Salter will take you painlessly back into the seventeenth century. Survey of Oxford in 1772 gives the occupant and the measurement of the frontage of every house in the city of Oxford, taken in consequence of the Mileways Act of 1771; and Oxford City Properties lists rental details of the numerous properties that were owned by the city up to 1855
- Newspapers The whole of Jackson’s Oxford Journal is available on microfilm (also at the central library) with a bound index for the years 1753 to 1790. See above for online indexes from 1791 to 1800, and full online version from 1800 to 1900 only
- Building plans The Oxford City Engineer’s Department Deposited Building Plans for 1875 to 1934 are available on microfiche. They list every street in Oxford and clarify which buildings were rebuilt, and when.
- Parish registers Transcripts of nearly all Oxfordshire parish
registers (also at central library). These often give clearer details of where people lived than older directories.
Don’t expect to find a street all listed under one parish: Broad Street and the High, for instance, each comes under four different parishes, and even St Giles Street is not all in St Giles’ parish. - Oxfordshire wills Often just the date of probate in the printed index book is enough to establish why and when a house changed ownership. The wills themselves are currently being digitized so that people can view them online, and are not available until September 2011
- Alumni Oxonienses The grander houses of Oxford were often occupied by academics, and biographical information can be found here.
- Electoral registers and title deeds
- Books with old photographs. These are too numerous to list, but are invaluable in understanding how buildings (whether surviving or not) were laid out. For shops in central Oxford, for example, see Michael L. Turner and David Vaisey, Oxford Shops and Shopping.