I MENTIONED in my letter (Memory Lane, March 24) that my mother, Inez Davies, and grandmother Flo Bovingdon ran the Bon Marche shop in Between Towns Road, Cowley.

I think, but cannot be sure, that they took over the shop from ‘new’ in the mid- to late-1930s.

Before moving to Cowley, they lived at the Bell Inn at Lower Heyford, my grandmother having taken over the licence on the death of her husband, Frederick, in 1928.

Bon Marche, as can be seen from the photograph, sold drapery and haberdashery (the sign says stationery and tobacconist as well but neither my brother Tony nor I can remember these being sold).

What Tony does remember is folk knocking on our back door on a Sunday, asking for cottons etc. He was then sent to get whatever they required!

When Gran retired, she leased the shop to Mr and Mrs Skelton, who ran it as Cowley Fruiterers and Florist.

After Mr and Mrs Skelton retired, the shop window was used in 1963 to display the plans for the new Cowley shopping centre.

The whole block of two shops and two houses was compulsorily purchased to make way for the new centre and the site is now occupied by an office block.

Little remains of the road that we knew. Only the area from Cowley Conservative Club to The Swan on our side of the road is roughly as it was.

St James Hall, on the other side, now the Oxford New Testament Church of God, used to be St Christopher's Junior School, my junior school.

JUDY MANSFIELD, Hampshire