Shell - Burford, Oxfordshire circa 1980
I'm starting to gather more history of this particular site in Burford for my own collection now but so many others have posted images of this petrol station too overall on Flickr there is an amazing array of images across the eras showing the history of the site. It helps of course when images have precise dates as that makes the timeline more accurate. As expected it started off pre-war selling a variety of brands and one of my very favourite images shows this, but there's also one from John Morgans Photos showing it in the 1930s, both can be seen below. Post war it seems the garage became a Shell solus site for several decades before changing to BP in the early 1980s. That lasted just a few years before the site changed brand to National as we see here. Then within a few years, BP discontinued the National brand and the petrol station here changed back to BP again. That would have been in the early 1990s. After that I don't know much more but I suspect soon after that petrol sales ended and it closed forever.
Below you can see the full time-line of the site from its earliest days right through to the present day with few gaps now. The only era that's really sketchy is the war era when petrol would have been Pool anyway. along with my previously posted pre-war image, and the other from John Morgan, I have two images from the 1960s as a Shell site, one might even be late 1950s but that's early for colour images. Using the changes of Shell pole sign design and assuming the changes were made fairly quickly it's possible to date each image within a few years, and some are precisely dated. For example TM Visser's image is dated 1978 and shows the pole sign in the style that Shell would use up to close to the end of the century. Certainly by the early 1980s the site had become BP branded, see Spottedlaurel's image below, and by the summer of 1985 it was National branded as we see here and in Reynardbizzar's image taken, incredibly, just one month earlier, the petrol is the same price! By 1991 it had reverted again to BP as is shown in Dave R's image. After that there aren't any more images I've yet found showing any further changes but legislation about kerbside delivery soon followed so that probably signaled the end of the site retailing petrol. If anyone has any more information or knows any more about what happened from 19991 up to the end of the century I'd love to know!
Finally below you can see an image I took last September showing the premises as it is now.
www.google.com/maps/@51.8068079,-1.6370088,3a,75y,53.7h,8...
Shell - Burford, Oxfordshire circa 1980
I'm starting to gather more history of this particular site in Burford for my own collection now but so many others have posted images of this petrol station too overall on Flickr there is an amazing array of images across the eras showing the history of the site. It helps of course when images have precise dates as that makes the timeline more accurate. As expected it started off pre-war selling a variety of brands and one of my very favourite images shows this, but there's also one from John Morgans Photos showing it in the 1930s, both can be seen below. Post war it seems the garage became a Shell solus site for several decades before changing to BP in the early 1980s. That lasted just a few years before the site changed brand to National as we see here. Then within a few years, BP discontinued the National brand and the petrol station here changed back to BP again. That would have been in the early 1990s. After that I don't know much more but I suspect soon after that petrol sales ended and it closed forever.
Below you can see the full time-line of the site from its earliest days right through to the present day with few gaps now. The only era that's really sketchy is the war era when petrol would have been Pool anyway. along with my previously posted pre-war image, and the other from John Morgan, I have two images from the 1960s as a Shell site, one might even be late 1950s but that's early for colour images. Using the changes of Shell pole sign design and assuming the changes were made fairly quickly it's possible to date each image within a few years, and some are precisely dated. For example TM Visser's image is dated 1978 and shows the pole sign in the style that Shell would use up to close to the end of the century. Certainly by the early 1980s the site had become BP branded, see Spottedlaurel's image below, and by the summer of 1985 it was National branded as we see here and in Reynardbizzar's image taken, incredibly, just one month earlier, the petrol is the same price! By 1991 it had reverted again to BP as is shown in Dave R's image. After that there aren't any more images I've yet found showing any further changes but legislation about kerbside delivery soon followed so that probably signaled the end of the site retailing petrol. If anyone has any more information or knows any more about what happened from 19991 up to the end of the century I'd love to know!
Finally below you can see an image I took last September showing the premises as it is now.
www.google.com/maps/@51.8068079,-1.6370088,3a,75y,53.7h,8...