They say nostalgia is not what it used to be, but a heavy whiff of the genuine article wafted through my house the other day when I brought back a few local history books. A couple of pictures in Banbury Then and Now, by Malcolm Graham and Laurence Waters (The History Press, £12.99) of E.W. Brown’s Original Cake Shop in Parson’s Street, Banbury, got my wife Anne and her sister Mary reminiscing as though there were no tomorrow. They recited to each other Walter de la Mare’s The Cupboard: “It has a little shelf, my dear,/As dark as dark can be,/And there’s a dish of Banbury Cakes/For me, me, me.” The famous shop and cafe sold mouth-watering Banbury cakes from 1638 until 1967. Then a property company submitted plans for a shopping development to include the iconic building, and it was demolished in April 1968.

Campaigners managed to obtain a last-minute preservation notice but it arrived just too late. Now the site is occupied by the Plaza Balti and Fashion Fabrics.

Anne and Mary, the daughters of the Rector of nearby Souldern, drooled over their childhood memories of Saturday treats in the fifties when they were taken to the shop. Unfortunately for Anne, she could only enter the shop with her eyes closed and then sit with her back to the wall — surveying a tree, presumably in a pot, that grew in the middle of the premises. This was because the wall was covered with a mural illustrating nursery rhymes, some in horrific detail.

Were it not for the deliciousness of the cakes she would never have entered the place at all; and every time she did so an internal battle was fought between cake and nightmare — with cake, made of spicy mincemeat and puff pastry, always winning. There is nothing like a taste, even a remembered one, to bring all sorts of other involuntary memories flooding back (as famously happened to Proust, of course with his madeleine biscuit dipped in tea).

There was the Fine Lady upon a white horse (of course), alongside the frightening ones. These depicted a man about to be decapitated (a reference to Oranges and Lemons there, and the line “Here comes a chopper to chop off your head”), and a picture of a cat being hanged.

This last had reference to an anti-Puritan rhyme by Banbury poet Richard Bratihwaite (1588-1673) which contains the lines: “To Banbury came I, O Prophane one!/Where I saw a Puritane one!/Hanging his cat on Monday/For killing a mouse on Sunday.”

Did he really see such a thing? We’ll never know. Certainly Puritanism was so strong in Banbury that the term Banbury Man, first used by Ben Jonson in his play Bartholomew Fair (1614), came to be used for any Puritan, whether from Banbury or not. And certainly the Puritans pulled down the original Banbury Cross in 1600, which stood in the Market Place. The present cross, designed by John Gibbs of Oxford, was put up in 1859-60 to celebrate the marriage of Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, also Victoria, to Prince Frederick William of Prussia.

Princess Victoria was the mother of the Kaiser who led Germany into the First World War in 1914. As it happens, I picked up another book at a boot sale the other day (price £1) called The Year 1911 Illustrated. From it, I learned that 100 years ago the Kaiser accompanied his first cousin George V, whose coronation occurred that year, when he unveiled the huge memorial to their grandmother Queen Victoria that stands in front of Buckingham Palace.

In 1899, the Kaiser had visited Blenheim and been welcomed by a troop of the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. But I could not help thinking that had proposed new laws about elder daughters inheriting the Crown, ahead of younger males, been in force then, his mother would have become Queen of England and he would have succeeded her!