Swindon in the Past Lane

It wasn’t that unusual in Victorian Britain for a woman to head a family firm, which is exactly what Susannah Phillips did after the death of her husband John. Susannah was born in Chatham, Kent on January 21, 1816, the daughter of George Reynolds and his wife Zipporah. Susannah married John Phillips, a carpenter, on December 25, 1845 at St Nicholas’ Church, Rochester. By the time of the 1851 census the couple were living in a house next door to the Victoria Inn on Victoria Street, Swindon with their two young daughters. John’s building projects in Swindon date from about 1852 and the census of 1861 records him as employing 27 men, so a not inconsiderable size business. As well as houses in the Quarries and King Street, John's firm built some significant and sadly now lost buildings. In 1866 he built not only the Congregational Church on the corner of Bath Road and Victoria Street, demolished in the 1940s for road widening purposes, but also the now derelict Corn Exchange ...

Devizes Road was a late starter getting on the property ladder.  Building along Nyweport Street had begun nearly five hundred years earlier while on Wood Street and High Street documents detailing 16 th  century property deeds survive. In 1773 Devizes Road was still an unnamed, rural lane known locally as Short Hedge or Edge after the hawthorn hedges that lined its route.  By 1841 there was little change with only twelve houses built along the lane, also known as Horsefair as this was the site of regular horse fairs where the animals were tethered along the hedgerow for inspection. Properties on the west side of the road date from the second half of the 19 th  century where the stone built terraced houses at 43-45 Devizes Road retain their original sash windows. Built in about 1830, Canford House was a private dwelling before it became home to Swindon’s early police force in the mid century.  With accommodation for a police superintendent, an i...