Category: Out and About

And we’re back on the #Banbury for #EnglishTourismWeek26 train with more insight into what makes Banbury such a great domestic tourism destination. Today – Spiceball Park. The glorious green space with the slightly weird name.

This post was inspired by yesterday’s glorious weather, weather that promises to continue today. I can’t say beyond that, but spring will bed in eventually. Right?

Let’s start with a few Spiceball stats and highlights:

• At 26 acres, it is the largest park in the town.
• It is a combination of ‘tended’ and ‘wild’ areas.
• This is actually the second Spiceball Park (more on that later).
• Setting for lots of town events (posted on those the other day)
• Is home to the weekly Banbury parkrun
• There’s a picnic area with free, DIY barbecue set-ups.
• Features include a children’s play area, skate ramps, and a circuit of footpaths, some dotted with fitness equipment.

But before I tell you why Spiceball is one of the places to be as the weather improves, we have to address the “meatball” in the room. I mean – Spiceball? What kind of name is that?

I’ve touched on this before, but it amuses me so much, I can’t help sharing it again. I’m aware stuff like this often takes the form of slightly questionable local lore, but I found this on the Banbury Town Council website, so I have no reason to doubt it.

In 1894, the then town mayor, a butcher named Thomas Hankinson, donated a plot of land so that the ‘poor people of Banbury’ could have a recreation area. Hankinson, as it happens, was known for his handmade meatballs, known throughout town as ‘spiceballs’ (though I have no idea what the spice in question was).

The original gifted land was what we now know as Bridge Street Park. When the larger space was created in the current location, the name came along with it, and the old site got a new name.

Connect to Nature… and to Banbury’s activity hotspots

Spiceball Park is a ‘green link’ from the centre of Banbury to Grimsbury Reservoir and the Oxford Canal towpath.

• Paths at the southern end of the park lead you to The Light Banbury, The Mill Arts Centre, lock29.banbury, Castle Quay, and the Banbury Museum & Gallery – all just a few minutes’ walk away.
• To the north, the park’s trails extend toward Grimsbury Reservoir and the Grimsbury Woodland Reserve (managed by the Banbury Ornithological Society). The reservoir probably deserves its own post, but for now, just know that it is surrounded by a flat, circular footpath (excellent for walking, jogging and dog walking), and is home to the Banbury Cross Sailing Club.

Generic visitor pamphlets might tell you the park is “lovely” – and it is. But it wouldn’t mention that Spiceball Park can be the core of a great day out, or even a relaxing weekend away.

It’s a great place to embrace nature, get some steps in, or have a run around with the dog or the kids – or both. When you’re ready to move indoors, you can wander from the park’s trails directly into the buzz of The Light Banbury for a film, head to The Mill for an evening of comedy, or visit Lock29 for a bit of independent shopping or lunch.

So, while the spiced meatballs are no more, we still have the park and all it offers. Get out there while the weather holds.

It’s Day 4 of my English Tourism Week 2026 in Banbury series— and today we’ve gone literary.

When people think about literary tourism in Oxfordshire, their minds tend to jump straight to Oxford. Fair enough — it’s the literary elephant in the room.

But Banbury is not without literary connections of its own and, with literary tourism one of the fastest-growing travel trends around, they are worth knowing about.

We’ve already talked about one of Banbury’s best-known literary appearances — Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross. Scroll back to Post #2 of the series to find more detail on that. Today we’ve got an impressive array of other connections to get through.

Let’s start with the biggest literary name – Shakespeare.

At the top of the “The Merry Wives of Windsor’ that” Bardolf addresses Slender as “You Banbury Cheese!” and this would have been commonly understood by the playgoers as an insult implying there wasn’t much to him – Banbury cheese being only about an inch thick.

That’s not to say Banbury cheese wasn’t popular – it was. In fact, it was better known than Banbury cakes at the time. It was just thin.

Banbury appears in one of the great works of English satire. As anyone who has seen the marker in the churchyard of St. Mary’s Church, Banbury knows, in the preface to the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift explains that he took the surname “Gulliver” from tombstones he saw in the churchyard of St Mary’s.

Move forward a few centuries and Banbury’s canal landscape makes another literary appearance — in quite a different literary world. The Oxford Canal that runs through town helped inspire the world of the “Gyptians” in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman drew heavily on the culture of Britain’s canals — narrowboats, trading routes and the communities that lived and worked along them — many of which once passed directly through towns like Banbury.

Schools in the Banbury area also seem to have made an impression on authorial types.

Satirical novelist Tom Sharpe, best known for the Wilt series, was educated at nearby Bloxham School, which later appeared (thinly disguised) as Groxbourne in his novel Vintage Stuff.

Meanwhile Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, taught at Banbury Grammar School in the early 1950s and lived in nearby Adderbury, where he named his cottage “Little Gidding” after T. S. Eliot’s poem from Four Quartets.

Banbury also features in the history of publishing.

During the 18th and 19th centuries the town became a centre for chapbooks — small, inexpensive booklets often containing nursery rhymes, ballads and short tales for children. Local publisher John Golby Rusher distributed these widely across the country, helping Banbury earn a reputation as a surprising hub of popular literature. (The impact of the Rusher publishing empire was significant enough that I may well do a deeper dive on it for the Banburian blog.)

But significant as it was, it wasn’t the only notable publishing story to come from Banbury.

The canals themselves also inspired one of the most influential books ever written about Britain’s waterways.

Author L. T. C. (Tom) Rolt wrote Narrow Boat while living aboard the historic fly-boat Cressy, which had been adapted for him at Tooley’s Boatyard here in Banbury. His account of a 1939 journey through Britain’s then-declining canal system helped spark the movement that ultimately led to the restoration and preservation of the waterways many people enjoy today.

I’m not saying that any of this makes Banbury a rival to Oxford as a literary pilgrimage site any time soon. But it does show that the town has left its own interesting mark on everything from nursery rhymes to satire, canal writing to modern fantasy.

And that’s a local story worth telling.

3rd Day of English Tourism Week and so time for the next post in my English Tourism Week 2026 in Banbury series.

One of the things English Tourism Week is meant to highlight is how local stories and local places shape the wider visitor economy.

Which brings me to a place in Banbury that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves — Banbury Museum & Gallery.

If you’ve walked along the canal from Spiceball Park, along The Light Banbury, past the GF Club And Waterside Bar Banbury – you’ve almost certainly seen it. The glass-fronted building sits right alongside the Oxford Canal and holds the story of Banbury and the surrounding area within it.

The museum’s permanent collections cover everything from the town’s Civil War connections and famous Banbury cakes to Victorian industry, canal trade and the everyday lives of the people who lived here over the centuries. It’s the sort of place where you can wander in for a quick look and suddenly realise you’ve spent far longer than planned.

And then there is the Pye Gallery – a space that hosts an impressive array of temporary and traveling exhibitions covering everything from Grayson Perry to Vikings, from 90s pop culture to robots and Lego, and even Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

Like many local museums across the country, Banbury Museum recently found itself at the centre of a debate about funding and priorities. When the possibility of losing support was raised, local residents made it very clear how much the museum matters to the town – and I must say I was pleasantly surprised to see how many people came out in support of the museum as quickly as they did.

Letters were written. Voices were raised. A great deal of hullabaloo ensued. And I wasn’t the only one surprised. In the end, the message landed: this is a cultural asset that the people of Banbury value, and the council found the money after all.

The museum remains open, continuing to tell the stories of the town and the people who shaped it.

So if you’re exploring Banbury during English Tourism Week, it’s well worth stepping inside.

Because behind that glass façade is not just a collection of objects — it’s the story of Banbury itself.

#Banbury #englishtourismweek2026