Tower House, 45 Queen Street
The last shop in Queen Street, No. 45, adjoins St Martin's Tower, and is appropriately known as the Tower House. It is a Grade II listed building (List Entry 1047184).
It was built in 1896, the year St Martin's Church was demolished except for its tower, and was designed by H. T. Hare, who was also the architect of Oxford's Town Hall.
In Kelly's Directory for 1899 Miss Louie Tompson is listed as the manager of the Café Royale in this building (although in fact she was then Mrs Kingerlee, as she had become the second wife of Henry Stephen Kingerlee near the end of 1898. Upstairs was the auctioneer James Hastings, who had also occupied the former building on this site.
By 1915 this building was occupied by Alfred Ballard, a watch & clock maker and jeweller. By the time of the 1921 census Ballard (66) had retired and was living at 233 Iffley Road, but he held on to the business, and in the 1920s (as can be seen in the detail below taken from a postcard), A. Ballard Ltd also operated as “Opticians to the Eye Hospital”. The business here was still described as “Ballard A. Ltd, watch mkrs” in the last Kelly's Directory of 1976.
In 2020 the Tower House was occupied by Burrows & Hare, and since 2021 by Montezuma's Chocolate.