Swindon in the Past Lane

As 140 members of Swindon Borough Council’s children’s services department move out to Wat Tyler House, Sanford Street School building stands boarded up and vulnerable. It was quite a different story when the school opened in 1881. On January 8, 1880 Ipswich based architect Brightwen Binyon presented his plans to the Swindon School Board for approval.  The cost of building a school to accommodate 800 children on the corner of Sanford Street and College Street was estimated at £4,000. In the same year Brightwen Binyon also designed Queenstown School and Gilbert’s Hill Girls and Infants School. Westcott School in Birch Street followed in 1881 and in 1891-3 he designed extensions to the Mechanics Institution, another Swindon building in dire need of rescue. Gloucester builder D.C. Jones & Co won the contract for Sanford Street School but by August 1880 they were in trouble.  Work was not progressing as speedily as the hard pressed School Board required....

A 19 th century programme reveals an energetic array of activities enjoyed by Swindon High School pupils at their annual Sports Day in 1898. The earliest record of a school in Swindon was the Free School founded in 1764 to educate 20 boys and 5 girls.  Pupil numbers soon outstripped the accommodation in a cottage in Newport Street and the National School was built on the same site in 1835. The school in The Sands began life as the Classical and Commercial School for Young Gentleman.  Swindon Advertiser founder William Morris, one of the schools' early pupils, was enrolled for about eighteen months to complete his education where schoolmaster George Nourse, according to Morris, was a nice, kind, old gentleman but lacking firmness and ability to teach. By 1869 Cornish born Samuel Snell was in charge.  One of five sons of a lead miner, Samuel was a pupil teacher by the age of sixteen and the only one of his brothers to escape the Cornish lead mines. ...