During the current coronavirus pandemic I’ve been undertaking #Covid19constitutionals that I’ve recored on this blog’s Born Again Swindonian Facebook page. Today’s such stroll took me on a visit to the Windmill Hill windmill. It’s a bizarre thing that, after 26 years in Swindon, it’s taken a pandemic to get me find out more about it. I even used to work on Windmill Hill in Trigonos.
Inching along with Swindon in 50 More Buildings, this post is about St Augustine’s Church in Even Swindon, Rodbourne. Having covered St Mark’s and St Barnabas (Gorse Hill) in Swindon in 50 Buildings, I had to get St Augustine’s into this blog series.
The Prospect Beerhouse is a building with an interesting history – both during and after its period as a beerhouse. And it’s now the home of my friends, Jo Garton and Chris Eley. It’s interesting, because when you’re in the house you do a feel it’s early life.
Knowing that I have a passing interest, that’s by no means expert, in architecture, someone tagged me on Twitter the other day a with a link to a fabulous article.
From a blog called Calcio England and entitled ‘Florence, Rome, Swindon: How the Grand Master of Italian Stadium Design Nearly Made His Mark in England’, the article had my interest well and truly piqued.
The County Ground Hotel Swindon
Hello lovely listeners. Hot on the heels of Secret Swindon, came my second publication for Amberley – Swindon in 50 Buildings – published in 2019.
[jetpack_subscription_form] The Spectrum Building My second favourite building, in Swindon, the David Murray John Tower being my number one, has to be the Spectrum Building – or the Renault Building as it still tends to be known. [gallery type="rectangular"...
Back in 1950, in his ‘Studies of Swindon’, John Betjeman wrote, apropos of architecture in Swindon, that there was ‘very little architecture in Swindon and a great deal of building’. He then went on to say that ‘Swindon, instead of being a West Country town, looked on its outskirts at any rate, like any industrial town anywhere.’
The Civic Society Movement & Swindon. Okay! If you’ve been paying attention at all you’ll know by now that here in Swindon we have an organisation by the name of Swindon Civic Voice. But what you might not know – and I didn’t until relatively recently – is that the civic society movement is a national one and there’s civic voices and civic societies all over the shop.
21 November 2015 'New Swindon' 1840 - 2015 - Swindon Civic Voice Walker's Guide Swindon - this is Swindon Though not intentionally planned that way, it turned out to be rather timely that Jess (@swindondriver) and I should go on an EXPOTITION and go exploring the New...
Swindon hits the headlines of the nationals – and yet again it’s an insult.
Beauty is only skin deep – and it lies in the eye of the beholder. You may have to dig but it’s there. Okay. There can’t be many of us by now that have missed the recent press coverage by The Telegraph and the Independent of Swindon’s bid to ‘become Britain’s new cultural magnet’ (The Telegraph.)
The now-defunct 1935 Art Deco style diving platform at Coate Water invokes a fair amount of nostalgia in me. As a child I was sometimes taken to Langold Lake (5 miles the ‘other’ side of Worksop). This was a large country park thing – my memories are hazy as it was MANY years ago now. But I recall a swimming lake with a diving platform in it.
I’ve always rather liked the Spectrum building or the Renault building as it tends to be referred to, even though the car company moved out of it some years ago.
