Swindon in the Past Lane

Today in the East End of London a group of dedicated people are trying to save the Smithfield General Market Hall - 'Behold the winged lion on the Holborn Viaduct looking down protectively upon the Smithfield General Market,' writes the Gentle Author on www.spitalfieldslife.com. 'as - over at the Guildhall the Public Enquiry that will decide the fate of this magnificent building designed by Horace Jones, the architect of Tower Bridge, reaches the end of its second week.' Read more about this threatened building by clicking the link - now read about Swindon's former market buildings, which sadly have also been lost. In the 1840s Old Swindon had a thriving shopping centre.  Blacksmiths, butchers and brewers rubbed shoulders alongside the Strange family's drapers store in the High Street and Sadler Bristow's ironmongers in Wood Street. But in the developing settlement at the bottom of the hill facilities for the early settlers in New Swindon were d...

What a difference a few months make.  For too long the dark empty windows of number 66-68 have stared out forlornly at the busy traffic along Commercial Road, but not any more.   Today the windows shine brightly with the arrival of the Prospect Charity Shop selling a wide range of good quality items from books to comfy sofas to curl up on and lamps to read them by. For more than thirty years the Prospect Hospice in Wroughton has provided specialist end of life care.  Today this service is also available at the Great Western Hospital and to people in their own homes. The Prospect Hospice is close to the hearts of the people of Swindon, particularly Swindon Society member Martin Vandervelde who has cycled many thousands of miles, raising more than £90,000 for the charity. Construction along Commercial Road dates from around 1890 with local builders Joseph Ponting, James Hinton, Charles Williams and Joseph Williams quickly getting in on the act. Today Co...

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....

Devizes Road was a very different place by the beginning of the twentieth century, its hawthorn hedgerow long gone and the horse fair a thing of the past. With two breweries and sixteen pubs within staggering distance, Devizes Road probably wasn’t one of the quietest places in which to live. Built by James Howe in 1847, the pub on the corner of Britannia Place began life as a humble beerhouse.  In 1870 the Britannia, described as containing ‘Bar, Parlour, Taproom, Small Parlour and 4 bedrooms’ went on the market and was snapped up by Bowly’s, another local brewery.  Enlarged and refitted, the pub opened under new management and with a new name.  The Fountain was used as a dressing room by the Swindon Town Football Club and their opponents when the team played at the Croft before moving to the County Ground in 1896.  Renamed The Pig on the Hill, the former Fountain, reopened in the summer of 2010 under new management.   Newspaper proprietor...

Devizes Road was a late starter getting on the property ladder.  Building along Nyweport Street had begun nearly five hundred years earlier while on Wood Street and High Street documents detailing 16 th  century property deeds survive. In 1773 Devizes Road was still an unnamed, rural lane known locally as Short Hedge or Edge after the hawthorn hedges that lined its route.  By 1841 there was little change with only twelve houses built along the lane, also known as Horsefair as this was the site of regular horse fairs where the animals were tethered along the hedgerow for inspection. Properties on the west side of the road date from the second half of the 19 th  century where the stone built terraced houses at 43-45 Devizes Road retain their original sash windows. Built in about 1830, Canford House was a private dwelling before it became home to Swindon’s early police force in the mid century.  With accommodation for a police superintendent, an i...

Swindon has been a work in progress since Brunel and Gooch sited an engineering works for the maintenance and repair of locomotives here in 1840.  Of course the industrial new town grew bigger and was more successful than anyone could have possibly predicted.  Pretty much the same could be said for the development that came after the railway boom. Victorian development on Princes Street, the site of construction work pictured here, began in the 1870s as building projects swallowed up fields of pasture right to the door of Eastcott Farm.  Among the builders at work on Princes Street were the entrepreneurial James Hinton, John Webb and one time publican at the Dolphin Inn, Rodbourne Charles Williams. The street that stretched from Regent Circus to the canal was named in honour of Albert Victor, eldest son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII.  The scandalous Albert Victor, once in the frame for the Jack the Ripper murders, died  fr...

Today advertising is big business as firms spend huge budgets on promoting their products. While celebrities  supplement their income persuading us to eat everything from crisps to luxury frozen meals, sports stars can earn seven figure sums from sponsorship deals and endorsements. We tend to think of advertising as a modern phenomenon, one of the evils of a media dominated lifestyle, but it was ever thus. An early example of the flyer, fodder for the recycling box today, was produced by Smith, Nash, Kemble and Travers 'wholesalers and retailers,' who in 1779 informed their customers of a sugar shortage due to 'the loss of Grenada.'  And by the beginning of the 19th century no entreperneurial opportunity to advertise was missed from bill boards to sandwich boards and of course, newspapers and magazines.  Swindon newspaper proprietor William Morris called his broadsheet the Swindon Advertiser, because it did just that. Regent Street was a proliferation of adver...