Swindon in the Past Lane

The Victorians knew a thing or two about retail therapy and might well have coined the phrase 'shop till you drop.'  The advent of mass production saw an explosion of 'must have' commodities for those fortunate enough to have a disposable income. By the 1860s Swindon's Regent Street, named after the famous London shopping precinct, was moving with the times as former worker's cottages were converted into shops. Swindon's first department store was opened in 1875 by Reading retailer William McIlroy, but the town would soon boast it's own home grown enterprise. Levi Lapper Morse was the eldest son of Stratton shopkeeper Charles Morse and his second wife, Rebecca Lapper.  The Morse family were prominent members of the Primitive Methodist movement in Swindon and financed the building of the Regent Street Church in 1849. Born over the shop at Stratton Green, Levi had retail in his blood.  In 1878 he acquired premises at 10-12 Regent Street and announc...

The front page of the Swindon Advertiser dated Friday May 4,1900 described the event as “one of the most attractive Sales of this class of Property ever Held in Swindon." Twenty two houses and a shop in Birch Street were among other town centre properties to come under the hammer of auctioneer Mr Ernest Bishop at the Regent Circus Sale Room of Bishop and Pritchett on May 21, 1900. With a yearly income of over £945 in rents (worth about £73,300 today) it was anticipated that the properties would sell easily. Birch Street was named after Henry James Birch, an accountant at the GWR Works during the late 19th century and was built in several phases during the 1890s by at least three builders, including Arthur Colborne. Arthur Joseph, born in Midsomer Norton in 1870, was the son of Thomas Colborne, also a builder and timber merchant who by 1873 was established at the Cross Roads, Stratton St. Margaret. From 1876-1940 the Colborne family built a staggering number of propertie...

Today a leafy, post war suburb of Old Town, Hesketh Crescent stands on the site of The Croft, an impressive house once modestly described as merely a large villa! The property appears on the 1841 census, then relatively newly built and occupied by Alfred Southby Crowdy, an Old Swindon solicitor with offices in the High Street. By 1861 another Swindon solicitor, James Copleston Townsend was living in the house on the hill, but probably the person most closely associated with The Croft was Levi Lapper Morse, owner of the Regent Street department store, politician and devout Methodist. The Morse commercial empire began in Stratton St. Margaret in the 1830s where Charles Morse had a drapers and grocers shop. Levi, eldest son of Charles and his second wife Rebecca Lapper, was born over the shop at Stratton Green in 1853. In 1875 Levi married Winifred, the daughter of Isaac Humphries, a farmer from Broad Hinton. By 1881, with the town centre store up and running, the young couple wa...