Banbury cake company with 400 year history shut down

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.