Nothing new about the general exodus of businesses from city centres. Take for instance Oxford’s oldest firm of builders, Knowles and Son. It moved to Osney Mead Industrial Estate in 1966, after joining a consortium with several other long established firms — including stonemasons Symm & Co (founded in 1815), printers Alden Press, and booksellers BH Blackwell — to buy from University College, a meadow which, until the Reformation, had belonged to the monks of Osney Abbey.

The consortium (put together by Robin Kemp of surveyors Kemp & Kemp), was responding to a vigorous campaign, propagated by Oxford city planners, to separate industrial districts from residential ones.

But the history of Knowles has been bound up with that of Oxford since the 17th century — long before its official founding date of 1797 when Thomas Knowles, great-great-great-great-grandfather of the present chairman, took over the business from the Townsend family which, along with the closely linked family of Peisley, had been responsible for building most of Oxford’s grandest architecture of the late 17th and early 18th century.

John Townsend, born in about 1648, the son of a labourer, emerged as the city’s leading stonemason and builder in the 1690s, after working his apprenticeship with Bartholomew Peisley. Togther with his son William, who became his apprentice, he undertook extensive building work at Pembroke and Lincoln Colleges, before starting work at Blenheim — where the company built the Kitchen Court. Even when the Marlboroughs fell from Royal favour in 1712, and work at the Palace ground to a halt amid rows about unpaid bills, the Townsends project was almost finished — unlike that at the main palace block where stonemason Edward Strong had downed tools.

John Townsend, who became Mayor of Oxford in 1720, retired to a house he built himself on the site of present-day Boswells department store. He is buried in a splendid baroque stone-carved grave at St Giles churchyard.

According to David Sturdy, who wrote A History of Knowles and Son, to mark the firm’s bi-centenary in 1997, John’s son William, went on to become Oxford’s “greatest master builder”. His company was responsible for building, among its dozens of prestigious projects, Peckwater Quad at Christ Church, to the design of the Dean, Dr Henry Aldrich; All Saints Church in High Street; the Clarendon Building in Broad Street; and the Codrington Library at All Souls, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The firm was also responsible for the Woodstock Gate and the Column of Victory at Blenheim, and the octagon temple in the grounds of Rousham House.

Sadly, after all this glory, the Townsends came unstuck a few generations later when the last of the Townsend bosses undertook a disastrous project to build a three-arch bridge to carry the old Roman Road, now the A30, across the River Thames at Staines. As a result of this ill-starred adventure Thomas Knowles, a manager at the firm, was able to buy the company. Since the takeover, the firm’s fortunes have varied. The original Mr Knowles’s last work is the gate at Jesus College, built in 1826.

As for businesses moving out of town, The Oxford Times moved to Osney Mead from New Inn Hall Street in the early 1970s. So I am writing this at Newspaper House, in Osney Mead, a period gem of its kind, designed by those pioneers of concrete, Arup Associates, and described by Pevsner “as one of the best commercial buildings” in Oxford.