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Farleigh Crescent, SWINDON, SN3 1JY

The junction is protected by a mini-roundabout and the shops include the Lawn Pharmacy

Popular community centre, offering coffee mornings, whist drives, luncheon club, bingo, bridge, and table-top sales.

Ordnance Survey cut mark benchmark described on the Bench Mark Database at http://www.bench-marks.org.uk/bm37337

Although much of the Lawn Estate is now around 50 years old, it was not until January 2002 that it got its own Community Centre. With a high proportion of elderly people, who had difficulty travelling far, there was a demand for such a facility for many years. Many other Swindon estates had Community Centres given them whether they wanted them or not, and as a result some have failed badly. But the one on Lawn has been a success story and is a tribute to the determination of the people who worked for many years to bring it about. Interestingly the centre is in a building that used to be The Gamekeeper pub, although it has been much altered. The centre has no licensed bar because at a well attended local meeting residents made it clear they didn't want this. Their feelings having been influenced by the anti-social behaviour surrounding the pub in its later years. The Lawn Community Association who run the centre is entirely made up of volunteers.

The Lawn Community Association run the Community Centre in Guildford Avenue. The premises were for many years a pub known as The Gamekeeper. In its early years it was a typical undistinguished estate pub. By the 1990's, as the population on the estate had aged considerably, very few local residents used the pub. It then attracted people from elsewhere whose anti-social behaviour, drug dealing, vandalism and after hours drinking caused great distress to local people. Fortunately the licence of the last landlady was withdrawn and the premises ceased to be a pub much to the delight of the vast majority of local residents. Today about the only reminder that this used to be a pub is this post which originally held the pub sign. Today it holds the Association's sign.

This estate has one of the highest proportions of senior citizens in Swindon but for years residents had to go some distance to see a GP. But the new millennium has seen the building of this new surgery, to which a practice from another part of town relocated. The site was originally reserved for a community centre but became free when the Gamekeeper Pub closed. That building was then used for the community centre. The car park to the right of the medical centre is a public car park for people using the shops and other facilities in Guildford Avenue.

This parade of shops (with flats over) is in Guildford Avenue on the Lawn Estate and provides the only shops on the estate. Currently there is a convenience store/newsagent (in premises which years ago was a small Gateway Supermarket), an off-licence, a hairdressers and a vet's surgery. The pharmacy was tacked on 2 or 3 years ago, following the opening of a GP surgery on the opposite side of the road. In the foreground can be seen one of Swindon's many little mini-roundabouts at the junction of Guildford Avenue & Windsor Road. At one point the Council pulled out almost every set of traffic lights in the town but in recent years traffic lights have come back with a vengeance but many mini-roundabouts remain as a trap for the unwary. This one was installed in an attempt to slow down speeding traffic in Windsor Road but much of the road remains a race track at some times of the day (& night).

For over forty years this site was reserved for a community centre, but it was never built. Next door, on the right, can be seen part of The Gamekeeper, the only pub on the Lawn estate. Eventually the estate received a community centre by the conversion of the pub, and the centre opened in 2002. At the time this photo was taken, that was still 19 years in the future. The site in this photo now has a medical surgery and car park built on it. Image;Image

The Lawn estate is a large overwhelmingly private housing estate built mainly in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Despite many more recent estates, it remains one of the most prestigious parts of the town in which to live. It is often called Lawns but the correct name is Lawn, named after the now demolished manor house which belonged to the Goddard family, who were the Lords of the manor. This little parade of shops are the only ones on the estate. Above them are flats.

A wintry scene at the lower lake on the Lawn estate. Memories of sliding across ice and sledging down nearby slopes.