As I pointed out in my piece about what’s left of Old Town’s Corn Exchange, I don’t intend to go overboard with long-gone buildings in this Swindon in 50 More Buildings series. Indeed, I hadn’t thought about covering the Garrard factory at all. But one of Royston Cartwright’s fab Facebook posts about the business prompted me to think I should include it. After all, Garrard was a hugely important industry for Swindon.
Sitting on Regent Circus, on the the opposite side to Rudi’s, and on the site of the forty-year-old ‘temporary’ library, lies Swindon central library. Designed council architects Nic Newland and Tony Currivan its 71, 405 bricks and 18, 415 roof tiles cost the princely sum of £10, 214, 930.00. Princess Anne performed the official opening of the library on 22nd May 2009.
One could well argue that creating a separate entry for The Cricketer’s Arms Pub constitutes a bit of a cheat, given that I covered the railway village as a whole in Swindon in 50 Buildings. But, given that, thanks to the work of the Mechanics’ Institution Trust it’s no longer rotting away, I felt it justified a special mention here.
Pavey’s Mill Wroughton is a welcome addition to this Swindon in 50 More Buildings series. That’s because, with my original Swindon in 50 Buildings book the brief didn’t allow me to cover any buildings in the wider borough.
STEAM museum Swindon. Otherwise known as STEAM – the museum of the Great Western Railway. It’s somewhat impossible to give Grade II listed building that houses this tourist tribute to God’s Wonderful Railway to one ex-Works building in particular. And that’s because it comprises a number of buildings.
These days a ubiquitous HMO, you’ll find what was the Ship Inn at 179 on the corner of Westcott Place, Birch Street, Park Lane and Faringdon Road, opposite the GWR park.
This entry in the blog’s Swindon in 50 More Buildings series features Radnor Street Chapel – and a little about the cemetery.
The Torin Building Swindon – and there’s a reason that I’ve specified Swindon here. It’s because our Torin building has a sister building of sorts in Brussels, Belgium. And I’ll return to that later.
Swindon’s Sanford Street school for boys opened in 1881 with capacity for 794 boys. The building cost of £5 per child was in-line with the standard cost of infant schools at that time – but this one boasted a superior design. It’s reasonable to assume that the school’s designer, Brightwen Binyon, felt proud of it being as he published it in Building News in 1881.
No 24 Fleet Street is one of the buildings I mention in the New Swindon/town centre trail that I wrote in my Born Again Swindonian guidebook. The whole point of that trail – indeed the book – is to urge and encourage the reader to find the interest, the story – yes even the beauty – in the less obvious. It exhorts one to look up because so often that’s where you’ll find the aforementioned.
Churchward House, now housing offices, originally served as the Great Western Railway’s drawing office. It’s named for George Jackson Churchward CBE ( 1857-1933). Churchward served as the GWR’s mechanical engineer from 1902-1922.
With Swindon in 50 Buildings, I had to keep to a firm brief set by the publisher, Amberley. I had to stay central – nothing from the wider borough. And the buildings I wrote about had to be still standing – they couldn’t be ex-buildings. So in this series of Swindon in 50 More Buildings I’m redressing some of that. Ergo, though I haven’t yet, I will include at least a couple of buildings from the wider borough and, if only one, an ex-building. Namely, ,Old Town’s Corn Exchange aka the Locarno.
