British bakery firm supplier Bakels was pictured in 2004 celebrating its 100th anniversary of operations in Bicester.

The company has now been going strong for more than 120 years, since 1904, and continues to work out of Granville Way in the town.

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It manufactures, distributes and technically supports ‘innovative’ bakery ingredients and solutions to the commercial bakery market.

In 2004, the UK regional managing director Paul Morrow and group chairman Armin Ulrich cut a centenary celebration cake to mark the occasion.

Find this and other archive pictures in this Oxford Mail gallery of bakery businesses in Oxfordshire over the years.

HRH The Duke of Gloucester toured the Chiltern Open Air Museum in Buckinghamshire, joined by the Lord-Lieutenant and the High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire, as part of the museum’s ongoing 50th anniversary celebrations.

During the visit, the Duke met pupils from Alder Grove Church of England Primary School taking part in an Anglo-Saxon learning day.

The Duke observed the children, who were engaged in an archaeological dig, learning to analyse and date artefacts.

HRH also explored the museum’s Victorian lambing fold and spoke with farm manager Rachael Maytum about the museum’s Oxford Down sheep and their role in the Chilterns’ farming history.

The Duke continued his tour on the Village Green, viewing a selection of historic buildings, including a 1940s prefab home, wartime Nissen huts and the newly reconstructed 1950s bandstand from Finsbury Circus.

Founded in September 1976 by members of the Historic Buildings Group of the Chiltern Society, the museum preserves threatened buildings that reflect ordinary life in the Chilterns.

Each structure is dismantled, transported and rebuilt at the site in Chalfont St Giles.

It first opened to the public in May 1981 with just four-and-a-half buildings and 95 visitors.

Since then, the museum has grown to welcome more than 50,000 visitors each year.

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the museum is inviting visitors and volunteers to share their photos and memories via its website.

Brown’s Original Banbury Cakes Limited was run by Philip Brown for nearly 30 years, since 1998, but he inherited a much longer tradition of making a selling the iconic cakes.

Banbury Cakes are small puff pastries with a rum-flavoured dried fruit filling, similar to Eccles Cakes, and Brown’s Original Banbury Cakes was famous for making them.

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The family-owned company had been doing so for nearly 400 years, working from the famous bakery at 12 Parsons Street from the early 1600s.

The once-beloved shop was demolished by a property developer in 1968, and rebuilt into the shops which now house a Japanese restaurant in its place.

However, the Banbury Cake business continued.

Traditional Banbury Cakes, cut in half to show the rum currant filling (Image: Wikimedia Commons / Redrose)

From the early 1900s, the shop had been run by two sisters named Lizzie and Lottie Brown, and Mr Philip Brown, who until recently had been the company’s baker, is the great-nephew of those sisters.

Mr Brown ran Brown’s Original Banbury Cakes as an order-only company, selling the heritage cakes through online orders and at shops like the Banbury Museum shop and Wykham Park Farm Shop.

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But the storied business was dissolved on April 7, 2026, according to documents on Companies House, and was voluntarily struck from the register and dissolved.

Mr Brown could not be reached for comment.

Wykham Park Farm Shop confirmed that the company had stopped supplying Banbury Cakes earlier this year when the baker retired and the company closed.