A clarion call to save our great Swindon boozers
Food and Drink Focus with Ed Dyer and Jamie Hill
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This is our monthly ‘Food & Drink focus’ edition which usually appears on the fourth Thursday of every month. The first Thursday is ‘Business’, and the second Thursday of the month is ‘Environment’, and the third Thursday is ‘Heritage’.
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Every pub closure is another heart ripped out of a community
By Jamie Hill
There’s nothing more depressing than walking past a once thriving pub now boarded up - a shell of its former glories.
Each empty establishment a community gone.
A ghostly presence staring you in the face.
Just this year in Swindon we’ve seen Manchester Road’s Tap & Barrel close its doors. The once popular centre of the community with its many music nights and parties is now going to be converted into a supermarket.
The pub might have been a bit rough and ready but that only added to its charm.
It was a similar story in Wanborough, just outside of Swindon, with the sudden closure of the Cross Keys in January. Fortunately there is now word that the pub will reopen under new management.
And we’re still awaiting news as to the future of The Rolleston on Commercial Road which has stood empty since May.
The Rolleston with its associated night club (The Furnace, Level 3, Levs) has been a troubled venue for at least the last 15 years, with various people coming in and trying to make a go of it before realising that it is nigh on impossible (especially with it being a tied house to Stonegate, who are allegedly known to make everything as difficult as possible for tenants).
It’s a hard life for a publican in Swindon and each closed pub like the overgrown former Regent Hotel on Victoria Road (now looking like something out of The Last of Us) stands as a monument to a once thriving community hub.
They are everywhere across Swindon.
The Boundary House in Moredon, empty since 2022.
The Duke of Edinburgh on Cricklade Road now being turned into flats.
The stats are scary on a national scale. Since the year 2000, the UK has seen more than a quarter of its pubs closing. That’s one in four.
In 2025, the UK is projected to see about one pub close per day, or around 378 closures, a rate of eight closures per week in the first half of the year.
There are lots of reasons for this - changing consumer habits, greedy pubcos, ridiculously heavy Government taxation, or simply bad management.
But each closure has been an absolute tragedy.
In rural areas it can be even more devastating.
A pub stands as somewhere that ties a community together and is definitely somewhere more than just a drinking establishment. It’s a place to meet your neighbours, a place to battle loneliness, a place to make you feel you belong.
For the people of Ogbourne St Andrew, a village on the Marlborough/Swindon road, news that their local pub The Silks on the Downs (formerly The Wheatsheaf) was facing closure was more than they could take.