Swindon in the Past Lane

If an Englishman's home is his castle, what message is conveyed by these front doors on Bath Road? Pull up the drawbridge or welcome - step inside and stay awhile, let me take your coat and sit by the fire, I'll put the kettle on. Building on Bath Road took off in around 1830 when property such as the elegant Apsley House was built for Charles Axford  Fox.  The development rapidly became an area for wealthy inhabitants of the genteel Old Town in contrast to the industrial clamour for housing at the bottom of the hill. Perhaps a candle lit chandelier once hung behind the fanlight at Fairview where James Fearnley Carlyle, a civil engineer, lived with his wife and three young children in 1881.  Whose task would it have been to sweep away that carpet of golden autumn leaves I wonder?  Not Miss Adkins the governess, nor Emma Augore the cook; another job for housemaid Florence Tonkin maybe. At number 33 Alice Deacon and her daughter Mary had thei...

Swindon Museum began life in the Victoria Hall on Regent's Circus in 1920 when geologist Charles Gore offered the town his collection of archaeological specimens and became the museum's first curator. However the collection rapidly outgrew its accommodation and by 1932 had moved to the imposing stone built property on Bath Road called Apsley House. Built in 1830 the first leaseholder of Apsley House was surgeon Charles James Fox Axford. No mention is made of the property in Axford's will written in July 1845, shortly before his death and the next occupier was another surgeon, Frederick H. Morris. The third resident was Richard Tarrant, a prosperous coal merchant whose coal yard stood at the rear of the house, on the area now occupied by Paxton House. But it is with another coal merchant that the house is most closely associated. Apsley House was business headquarters and home to the Toomer family for over fifty years. Born in Hampshire, John Toomer mov...

By the bandstand in Town Gardens is the perfect place to play, as the children pictured here reveal.  Following heavy early morning rainfall the sun came out and turned the bandstand into a shimmering playground for young and old alike. Three friends attract an admirer as they sit and eat their packed lunch and trade at the kiosk is brisk - no brown bread left when I order my cheese and onion toastie. In 1892 the Old Swindon Local Board paid £700 for a seven acre plot of worked out Purbeck limestone quarry between Bath Road and Westlecot Road owned by the Goddard family, long time Lords of the Manor.  Designed by local architect W.H. Read work was completed within 18 months and Town Gardens opened with a flourish in May 1894; the inaugural ceremony an exercise in Victorian pomp and self congratulation. Led by the 2nd Wilts Volunteer Band a procession of 19th century Swindon worthies marched from the Market Square to the new gardens by way of Newport Street and Springfiel...

Newport Street is probably the oldest recorded thoroughfare in Swindon and was first mentioned in documents dated 1346.  In 1874 Thomas Hooper Deacon and his business partner Thomas Edmund Liddiard signed a lease on the mansion house, garden, yards and stables on the corner of High Street and Newport Street, formerly occupied by John Harding Sheppard. Under the same agreement they also acquired various other properties in the area behind the two streets to further extend their VWH Horse and Carriage Repository. The business flourished and in 1879 1,872 horses were entered for sale across the year. Today Thomas Hooper Deacon is commemorated in the naming of Hooper Place, a lane close to the site of the Newport Street entrance to the former Vale of White Horse Repository. This 1950s photograph shows Newport Street almost unrecognisable today with the Co-op Store occupying the former corner site of Sheppard’s mansion house. Upham Road marks the divide between old ...

This 1950s aerial view of Swindon takes a broad sweep of Old Town from the junction at Okus Road and Kingshill, along Bath Road and Wood Street to the Goddard Arms Hotel at the top of the photograph. Okus Road takes its name from Okus Farm, which stood at the western end of Swindon Hill and was owned by the Goddard family from the mid 17th century.  The thatched Okus Barn, dating from the same time, survived into the 20th century but was demolished in 1975. Old Swindon Local Board records include a covenant for laying out new streets and sewers at Okus dated 1890 with building dating from around the turn of the 19th century. Kingshill House, former home of the Bowly family, was bought by the Borough and converted into a maternity hospital in the early 1930s.  This aerial view shows additional buildings in the grounds and also in front of neighbouring Victoria hospital. A collection of Nissan hut type structures stand on the site of the present day Savernake Stree...