Swindon in the Past Lane

Having wondered how I would get a photograph looking down busy Commercial Road, it turned out to be quite easy. A gap in the traffic, hold your nerve and hey presto. A photograph of Commercial Road today is far removed from those taken during the late Victorian period when it was a tree lined vista of elegant, red brick villas. However, as it's name suggests Commercial Road was always intended to be at the heart of Swindon's growing commercial centre, an important highway linking Old and New Swindon and a busy shopping street to rival Regent Street. Central to the development of Swindon, Commercial Road was constructed in the late nineteenth century and heralded the first phase of development on the valuable Rolleston Estate. The Rolleston Estate, a large land holding that originally belonged to the Vilett family, was crucial to the development of New Swindon. In the 1880s the vast area of prime building land was held in chancery following the bankruptcy of it's the...

In 1870 William Vilett Rolleston inherited an estate worth an estimated £20,000 (today approximately £2.3 million). By 1874 he was declared bankrupt and you have to ask the question – where did it all go wrong? The Vilett presence in Swindon is believed to date back to the sixteenth century when the family were among those who snapped up local properties during that great land dispersal event at the dissolution of the monasteries. But where did William's Vilett connection come from? The eldest son of George and Mary Augusta Rolleston, William Vilett Rolleston was born in Leamington Priors, Warwickshire in 1842. William's father George was the child of Samuel Rolleston and his first wife Elizabeth Herring. In 1827 the widowed Samuel married Harriet Vilett but there were no children from this second marriage. When  Harriet died in 1870 William Vilett Rolleston inherited the estate left to her by her brother Thomas Vilett. What became known thereafter as the Rolleston...