A UK cake company has shut down after a staggering 400 years in business.
Brown’s Original Banbury Cakes Limited, based in Banbury in Oxfordshire, was for the past 30 years run by family owner Philip Brown.
But the family run firm has been making its iconic Banbury cakes for nearly 400 years, working from a site in the town in Parson’s Street since the early 1600s, reports the Oxford Mail.
Banbury cakes are a local speciality, a spiced oval shaped currant pastry which usually includes mixed peel, brown sugar, rum and nutmeg and the firm guarded its family recipe for the doughy treats for centuries.
The once well-known shop was knocked down in the 1960s and replaced with a house and a Japanese restaurant, but the cake firm continued to trade and recently sold cakes through online orders instead.
The business was dissolved voluntarily on April 7, 2026, according to Companies House.
An entry on a local history website delves deeper into the traditions of the long established family firm.
It reported that a ‘conscientious objector’ from World War One later found work at the store following the war. It recalled: “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 added: “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.”