Water Tower Great Western Works, Swindon.
I was over in Swindon last week for a meeting and had time to do a quick sketch of this structure. It is a water tower at the end of an elegant street of workers houses built by the former Great Western Railway Company. The tower was built in 1870 and provided a high pressure water supply for fire fighting within the adjacent GWR works yard. It was conserved in 2014 and the surrounding saw mills converted to house the University Technical College Swindon. This describes itself as ‘an innovative, employer-focused, high-tech school for students aged from 14 to 19, specialising in engineering'. The structure is quite dramatic- an intrusion of 'steam punk' in an otherwise carefully designed streetscape of Tudor Gothic workers houses to one side and the stone and brick boundary wall of the works on the other. Today, the works are no longer used for repairing and constructing engines and rolling stock and its buildings have largely been converted into residential and office uses. The headquarters of the National Trust and Historic England's Archive are both located within the grounds.
I was over in Swindon last week for a meeting and had time to do a quick sketch of this structure. It is a water tower at the end of an elegant street of workers houses built by the former Great Western Railway Company. The tower was built in 1870 and provided a high pressure water supply for fire fighting within the adjacent GWR works yard. It was conserved in 2014 and the surrounding saw mills converted to house the University Technical College Swindon. This describes itself as ‘an innovative, employer-focused, high-tech school for students aged from 14 to 19, specialising in engineering'. The structure is quite dramatic- an intrusion of 'steam punk' in an otherwise carefully designed streetscape of Tudor Gothic workers houses to one side and the stone and brick boundary wall of the works on the other. Today, the works are no longer used for repairing and constructing engines and rolling stock and its buildings have largely been converted into residential and office uses. The headquarters of the National Trust and Historic England's Archive are both located within the grounds.
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