Swindon, Wiltshire

Mighty delicate

If you think of Swindon as a railway town, which, as the location of the GWR locomotive works it certainly became in the 19th century, you’d expect it to have at least one water tower. It still has more than one, and this is my favourite. It’s on the edge of the railway works site, and is extra tall so that it could provide water at high pressure, for fire-fighting. It was built in 1870 using components of cast iron and the strength of the ironwork and its bracing is enough to create a tall structure bearing what must have been a prodigious weight of water in the tanks on top.

The delicacy of this structure, which reminds me of the appearance of the iron frameworks around gas holders, tricks the eye somewhat. There are four stages to the tower, marked by a succession of cast-iron girders, and each is far bigger than a single storey of a conventional house – it’s roughly 75 feet tall all told I think and the tanks are about 2 metres high. By 1870, Victorian engineers were very good at building iron framework structures. After all, they’d had lots of experience, constructing bridges and making load-bearing frames for factories. It might have been easy for them, but, seeing a frame exposed like this – and beautifully preserved too – still impresses me, mightily.

Swindon, Wiltshire

Whatever next?

Whatever can that be? This was my first thought on encountering The Platform, now a venue for music and educational work concerned with the arts, in Swindon’s Farringdon Street. The spires made me think of a church, but the part to the left, with its small windows over several storeys, did not seem to fit with that, unless this was a very well appointed Victorian chapel, with additional hall and meeting rooms. Surely not?

The building is on the edge of the railway village, built by the Great Western Railway from 1840 onwards to house staff at the locomotive works that stands nearby. Many of the workers, who arrived in Swindon from all over the country, were single men, and Brunel saw the need for accommodation suited to them – somewhere to lodge for people who did not need or could not afford a whole house. So he built this, a ‘model’ lodging house, designed to house about 100 men and to provide kitchens, a bakery, and day rooms (the individual mens’ rooms were small, with space for a bed, drawers and a chair, so residents needed somewhere to relax when they weren’t working). Construction began in 1847, but immediately stopped because of a recession, to be resumed again in 1853–55 to a revised design.

The result was certainly impressive, but the hostel wasn’t popular with those who lived there, who mostly preferred to find traditional lodgings with local families. Locals took to calling the place ‘the Barracks’ and apparently the residents found it institutional. One can’t blame them. Buildings made up of scores of similar rooms usually do have that feeling to them. In the early 1860s, the company converted it to small flats, to house an influx of Welsh ironworkers who were hired when they built new rolling mills, but even these men and their families were soon accommodated in proper houses added to the railway village. After a while the building became a Wesleyan Chapel, then in the late-20th century a museum of the GWR, then, after 2000, was given over to its present use. Now, presumably, it languishes in lockdown, and one hopes the current users will be able to return soon and bring life to this lively piece of architecture.

 

Swindon, Wiltshire

Showroom

My previous post about the striking lettering on the Desborough corset factory reminded me of something similar that I saw not long ago in Swindon. This time it’s a shop, and one that follows the pattern for big, well lit premises of a specific kind of retailer in the late-19th century.

William Wallace Hunter came to Swindon from the East End of London in the late-19th century. By the 1890s he had a furnisher’s shop in the town and in by 1901 his business was installed in these premises in the centre of Swindon on the corner of Edgeware Rad and Regent Street. Like many furniture shops in the period, Hunter’s was large and well-lit: a real showroom, where he could display large pieces in a light setting ensured by generous areas of glass on the ground and first floors. The proprietor’s name was built into the structure, with a stone panel on the end and huge letters made up of a tessellation of white-painted blocks on the long facade. Like many Victorian and  Edwardian enterprises, it seems to have been undertaken with optimism: this kind of built-in lettering suggests that the business was here to stay. I’m not sure exactly how long the business lasted. Online sources mention the 1940s, and the local archives hold records of the company up to 1941, so it seems to have reached its half-century at least. It’s a shame those light upper rooms are no longer used in the original way, but at least the building survives, together with the lettering, to remind us of the enterprise that created it.