Brown’s Original Banbury Cakes, based in Oxfordshire, has been making its iconic spiced currant pastry since the early 1600s, but the business was voluntarily dissolved on April 7
A British cake company has shut down after an incredible 400 years of trading.
Brown’s Original Banbury Cakes, situated in Banbury, Oxfordshire, had been operated for the last three decades by family proprietor Philip Brown.
The business had been producing its famous Banbury cakes for almost four centuries, operating from premises in the town’s Parson’s Street since the early 1600s.
Banbury cakes are a regional delicacy – a spiced oval-shaped currant pastry typically containing mixed peel, brown sugar, rum and nutmeg – and the company protected its family recipe for the pastry delights.
The once-renowned shop was demolished in the 1960s and replaced by a house and a Japanese restaurant, though the cake business carried on operating and latterly sold cakes via online orders, reports the Express. The company was voluntarily dissolved on April 7, as per Companies House records.
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A post on a local history website explores the heritage of the long-standing family enterprise in greater detail. It revealed that a conscientious objector from the First World War secured employment at the shop after the conflict.
It said: “My father had come to Banbury on a month’s trial as a manager of E. W. Brown’s Original Cake Shop, 12 Parson’s Street.
“During the 1914-1918 War he had been a conscientious objector and was a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit in France. After the war he was sent as quartermaster, to Uffculme Hospital for limbless men at Egbaston, Birmingham.
“The hospital had been given by members of the Cadbury family and pioneering work was being done in making and fitting artificial limbs for disabled soldiers.”
It went on to say: “Besides his job as quartermaster, he helped teach men to walk and use their artificial limbs. He loved the work, for which he had a real vocation.
“However, when the hospital was taken over by the City of Birmingham, he was untrained, he was out of a job. E.W. Brown’s, like many other Quaker firms, were offering work to unemployed Quakers, although the owners Lizzie and Lottie Brown, were doubtful if my father would prove suitable.
“However, he stayed for 20 years, later becoming a partner. He loved the old shop. It was his whole life and he was broken-hearted when the partnership was dissolved in 1941.”
