Ruscote
The Ruscote, Hardwick and Hanwell Fields estates are three interconnecting Banbury estates that were built between the 1930s and 2000s (decade).
During excavations for the building of an office in Hennef Way in 2002, the remains of a British Iron Age settlement with circular buildings dating back to 200 BC were found. The site contained around 150 pieces of pottery and stone. Later there was a Roman villa at nearby Wykham Park. A small drinking-water reservoir lies to the north of Hennef way. The major road was named after Hennef in Germany.
Ruscote was a local village, that dated back to the 15th century, but did not develop until the late 19th century. It was formally incorporated into the borough of Banbury in 1889.
The 1919 Housing Act was followed by the building of the Easington housing estate of 361 council houses in what was one of the first slum clearance schemes in the country. By 1930 the medical officer reported 131 Banbury town centre houses unfit for habitation. So in 1933 Banbury council opened the Ruscote housing estate of 160 houses. The heavy increase in population between 1931 and 1949 was accommodated by the expansion of the town in three main areas, in each of which houses were built both by the town corporation and by housing private companies. The three areas were between the Oxford and Bloxham roads, where about 500 houses were built before 1939 to form the bulk suburb of Easington; in the area of the older village and suburb of Neithrop, where before 1939 some 500 houses were built both around the earlier houses and further west in new streets on either side of the Warwick road, a development which was extended to the south-west after 1945. In 1933 Banbury council opened the Ruscote housing estate of 160 houses, for working class families.
The estate, which now has a notable South Asian community, was expanded in the 1950s because of the growth of the town due to the London overspill and further grew in the mid-1960s.
The Oxfordshire Ironstone Railway (OIR) was opened between 1917 and 1919, was closed in 1967 and the line was lifted between 1967 and 1968. It was a major employer in Banbury for many of those years.
The mid-1950s the council established the Southam Road Industrial Estate which was successful in bringing a wide range of industries to the town. The most important newcomer was General Foods Ltd, formerly Alfred Bird & Sons (now Kraft Foods), which produced convenience foods. The plant was built between 1964 and 1965 and the company moved to Banbury from Birmingham in 1965. General Foods received active political and fiscal co-operation from the council to partly help find jobs for the local London overspill population. Kraft Foods Banbury is the Kraft centre of manufacturing in Britain, with the Kraft UK headquarters located at Cheltenham. A new factory with a 80,000 square feet (7,400 m2) floor space was being constructed in 1969 for Encase Ltd and a factory was being built for Demag Hoists and Cranes Ltd., a subsidiary of Demag Zug, one of the world's largest manufacturers of lifting equipment. The industrial estate had become one of the 'economic epicentres' of the Banburyshire region by the early 1970s.
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