Thomas Henry Kingerlee, aged 25, took over his father’s plumbing and glazing firm in Banbury.

Thomas Henry Kingerlee lived with his family at 5 Butcher’s Row, Banbury, a property that Kingerlee later refurbished in 2014 for Charity Style Acre.

By the time of the 1881 census Thomas was describing himself as a ‘master builder’ and was employing twenty men. In 1883 Thomas, his wife and three children moved to Oxford and Thomas took over the long-standing business of Alfred Wheeler at 16 Queen Street.

Kingerlee built the Wilberforce Temperance Hotel at 35 Queen Street at a cost of £5,000. The firm’s offices and builder’s merchants moved into the ground floor, remaining here until 1960. One of Thomas’s first major commissions in Oxford was in 1884, the new isolation hospital for infectious diseases at Cold Harbour, a mile out of the city along the Abingdon Road.

Kingerlee had their own brickworks near Wolvercote until the 1930s. Thomas was elected Mayor of Oxford for 1898/99, and for a second term in 1911/12. By 1900 Thomas Henry Kingerlee was the biggest housebuilder and landlord in Oxford and wielded considerable power in the city.

Kingerlee built Frank Cooper’s Marmalade Factory in 1903. The building still stands today and is listed.

In 1911 Kingerlee built the Oxford Picture Palace on Jeune Street off the Cowley Road in east Oxford. The building is now the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford’s oldest surviving cinema.

Thomas’s son Charles and grandsons Cyril and Jack all fought in the First World War.

Thomas Kingerlee died in 1928 but by then his two sons and a grandson had joined the business and continued to manage a variety of activities, which included a joinery workshop and builder’s merchant.

The Oxford Ice Rink on the Botley Road was one of the largest single-span buildings in the country when it was built by Kingerlee in 1930.

In 1928 Kingerlee began the first of many projects on site at Pressed Steel.

By the mid-1930s the company had built over 700 new houses throughout Oxford’s suburbs, making it by far the city’s largest developer.

The company carried out a good deal of work in London up to the Second World War. One of the last building projects there was the St John the Baptist Church in Tottenham, completed in 1939.

During the war Kingerlee built various MoD facilities around Oxfordshire, and joinery production continued.

Kingerlee carried out extensive work at Wolvercote Paper Mill until the mid-1950s.

The joinery workshop moved to Lamarsh Road (off the Botley Road) in 1958.

By 1962 Kingerlee’s head office had moved from Queen Street to Lamarsh Road to join the joinery works

During the latter part of the century the company concentrated on general contracting, playing its part in rebuilding after the Second World War and responding to the boom years in the sixties and seventies. 

The construction of the paint shop at Pressed steel was the first Kingerlee project worth over £1m.

Kingerlee did a lot of work at Blenheim Palace and throughout the 1960s and ‘70s we still had a team of painters and plumbers permanently on site. A project to stabilise the Palace’s South West Tower was carried out in 1977.

Kingerlee re-started the development business, building a number of prominent apartment blocks in North Oxford to create more than 200 new homes in all.

In the mid-1970s the firm carried out extensive work at Lloyds Bank at Carfax in Central Oxford.

In 1988 Kingerlee built the BBC Radio Oxford studios in Summertown.

In 1995 Kingerlee built the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building for St Hilda’s College in Oxford.

 Kingerlee carried out a major redevelopment project at the former Morrell’s (Lion) Brewery site in St Thomas’s in Oxford.

In 1999 Kingerlee moved to brand new purpose-built premises, with extensive yard and joinery workshop facilities, at Langford Locks, Kidlington.

 The Park End Street development followed in 2004.

Kingerlee built Flint House on the Waddesdon Estate, which went on to win the 2015 Grand Designs House of the Year.

The firm is now under the management of the fifth generation of the Kingerlee family and in 2018 celebrates 150 years trading.