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...