Town centre
visitors could be forgiven for thinking of Edgeware Road as a mere shortcut
behind Regent Street shops to the law courts on Princes Street. But before the 1960s development Edgeware
Road was a busy community presided over by St Paul’s Church.
Building began on
Edgeware Road in 1877 by H.C. Smith and by the time of the 1881 census there
were seventeen occupied houses.
Primitive Methodist Minister Thomas Powell lived at the grandly named Bourne
Villa, while his neighbours were mostly GWR employees, among them a coach
builder, a railway clerk and a boiler maker.
A new church was soon
needed for the growing town centre community and in 1881 Gloucester builders D
& C Jones & Co began work on St Paul’s Church, designed by Edmund
Ferrey. William Morris,
founder of the Swindon Advertiser, recorded that St. Paul’s, like St Mark’s in
the railway village, held highly ‘Ritualistic’ services. He wrote that the High Church practises
included processional hymns and banners and that on special occasions the altar
was ‘ablaze with candles.’
Local builders
Tydeman Bros & Sons Ltd had premises in Edgeware Road and in 1901 and 1909 building applications by the
firm added another thirteen houses, a carpenter’s shop, a workshop and a shed
to the neighbourhood.
Sadly all that
remains of the Victorian Edgeware Road today is the W.W. Hunter building fronting
Regent Street.
Born in the east
end of London, William Wallace Hunter moved to Swindon towards the end of the nineteenth century. In 1891 he
lived over his furnishers shop at 24 Regent Circus with his wife and their two
young sons. But by 1901 William had built
his spacious showrooms on the corner of Regent Street and Edgeware Road and
moved his family into a villa on Bath Road.
In around 1905
William Hunter developed two streets off Ferndale Road and named one of them
Hunters Grove. According to Peter
Sheldon and Richard Tomkins in their book Roadways, St Mary’s Grove was named
in honour of his wife.
With the outbreak
of war in 1914, two of William’s three sons answered the call to the
colours. William’s youngest son, Second
Lieutenant William Samuel Hunter served with the 9th Battalion of
the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment and was killed in action on February
1, 1916. He was 21 years old.
Newly married
Ralph enlisted in 1915 and served with 345 Company in France from September 1915
to January 1916. He returned to Britain
as a casualty and was later released for civil employment with the Royal
Aircraft Factory at South Farnborough.
William and his
wife Mary retired to Weston super Mare where he died in 1936, but it would
appear that the family furnishers remained in business until at least the
1940s.
When Edgeware Road
was demolished along with a network of town centre terraced housing during the
1960s redevelopment, an estimated 4,500 residents were moved to outlying areas
of Swindon.
Looking down Cow Lane towards Tydeman Bros.
St Paul's Church, Edgeware Road
Old images of Swindon are published courtesy of Swindon Local Studies
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