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Floods in Oxford: November 1894

The six photographs below were taken during the Oxford floods of 1894
and were published as postcards about ten years later

Botley Road

Port Meadow

Fisher Row

The Railway

Near the junction of Abingdon Road and Canning Crescent. The buildings on the right were called the “saltboxes'”

“The Fox & Hounds”, Abingdon Road, Oxford

The Fox & Hounds was then on a different site from the present-day pub of that name, and from 1891 its landlord was Charles Turner. The pub remained open throughout, despite being under three feet of water, and here the Morrell’s Brewery dray can be seen delivering barrels of beer.

The pub is listed under Cold Arbour in early directories, and not under the Abingdon Road. (This area was considered to be beyond the pale, which is why it was chosen as the site of Oxford’s Isolation Hospital.)

This old pub was demolished in the 1920s, and a new Fox & Hounds built on an adjoining site at 279 Abingdon Road. The site of the old pub was a petrol station for many years, and the picture below shows the same scene in the lesser floods of 25 July 2007.

The following report on these floods appeared in Jackson's Oxford Journal on 4 November 1894. The Seven Bridges Road that was navigable by punt is the current Botley Road.