Tony Baldry

More about Banbury

Banbury is the main town serving north Oxfordshire. It has a population of approximately 40,000 people and is twinned with Ermont in France and Hennef in Germany.

The electorate of North Oxfordshire is drawn mainly from the expanding towns of Banbury and Bicester (which grew from 15,000 to 20,000 in the 1980s), the remainder being made up of the villages of north east Oxfordshire.

Banbury and Bicester have large housing estates and modern industrial development. The proportion of owner occupiers in the constituency has risen from less than half in 1971 to 55 per cent in 1981 and 67 per cent in 1991.

There is still a strong armed forces presence around Bicester, and despite recent closure of the USAF base at Upper Heyford the percentage of men employed in the services is higher than in any other seat in the South East of England north of the Thames. There is also some farming and some tourism, although most of the stone-cottaged villages on the edge of the Cotswolds are relatively undiscovered.