POWER has been restored to shops and businesses in Oxford city centre this afternoon after they were struck with outages for much of the morning. 

A fault in an underground cable saw 27 buildings in and around the Clarendon Centre intermittently lose power for more than seven hours. 

Businesses in Cornmarket Street, Queen Street and Shoe Lane were all affected until power was finally restored at 2.20pm. 

Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks engineers were alerted to a fault in the low voltage network at 7.20am this morning.

They attended the site to investigate and replace fuses, with some customers having their power initially restored at 9.20am only to see it disconnected again shortly afterwards.

The faulty cable has now been repaired.

A SSE spokesperson said: “We would like to apologise to our customers in Cornmarket Street and surrounding areas of Oxford who have been affected by the power cut this morning.

"We’d also like to thank them for their patience as our engineers worked to restore their power supplies as quickly and as safely as possible.”