Olde Reine Deer Inn, Banbury (Olde Reindeer Inn)

In the heart of historic Banbury, this wonderful old inn may have originated as a fifteenth-century timber-framed structure and was extended in the early/mid-sixteenth century. It was an inn perhaps from about 1570 but the first mention of it by name was in 1666. For our purposes the main attraction is the Globe Room of 1637, a near-square space which was richly fitted out immediately after building with superb panelling, a stone fireplace, Ionic columns framing the great east window, and a pair of ornate doors plus a richly-moulded plaster ceiling (see old photos in the pub). The panelling was sold off in 1912 but, after storage in London, was returned in 1965 and finally reinstalled in its original home which formally reopened in 1984. Not so the ceiling, plaster casts of which are in the Victoria & Albert Museum. The front part of the pub is thought to have comprised two small rooms either side of a corridor. There are a couple of seventeenth-century fire surrounds (no doubt imported from elsewhere), a heavily beamed ceiling and some old panelling. The faux-antique spelling of the name is relatively modern (in 1760 it was the ‘Rein Deer & Plough’) but, as the mosaic floor at the entrance testifies, it was current by the early twentieth century.