By 1918, Dr Addison MP, Minister for Reconstruction and Health had pressurised Banbury Rural District Council into starting a building programme to construct 170 houses in the rural villages. The houses were designed by Thomas Lawrence Dale, an architect who had served as a captain in the Great War and who had designed houses in Hampstead Gardens Suburb before the war.

The accounts for each site were kept separately and the six houses built in Acre Ditch, Sibford Gower, were of the ‘parlour’ type built at a total cost o f £4945.5s.1d. That is £824.5.10d per house. The Sibford Gower houses were built in three sets of semidetached pairs o f properties. Each house had at least a quarter of an acre of land where a pigsty could be built. Henry Boot and Sons was the main contractor completing 128 of the total 170 houses which were built in eighteen months in the surrounding rural villages and they were all completed by 1922. Built for the heroic soldiers returning from the Great War each ‘parlour house’ had a parlour, a large living room, a kitchen range and grate, a cement floored scullery, a washhouse with boiler and space for a tin bath, but no bathroom or toilet. There was a shed for coal and potatoes. Outside the back of each house was a 200 gallon rainwater tank and rent was charged at 7/6d per week for a parlour house and 6s. per week for a ‘non parlour’ house.

Currently some of these six houses are managed and maintained by Sanctuary Housing for the local authority but others have been purchased from the council and are now in private ownership.

Maureen Hicks