The David Murray John Tower: An icon on Swindon's skyline
The monthly Ink Heritage focus - plus a spotlight on art and heritage
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This is our monthly ‘Heritage focus’ editions which will normally appear on the third Thursday of every month. The first Thursday is ‘Business’, and the second Thursday of the month is ‘Education’, and the final Thursday is ‘Food & Drink’.
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Celebrating the extraordinary David Murray John Tower
By historian and author Angela Atkinson
In recent weeks the iconic (to coin a much over-used adjective) David Murray John tower has been in the local news again in this Swindon Advertiser article about the much-needed repair works not yet happening. And that gives me an excuse, not that I need one, to talk about my favourite building. After all, I’ve not used Swindon’s Chrysler building on the cover of two of my books for nothing!
Yes, I know many see it as an eyesore but I love it – and I’m not on my own in that. I think it’s stunning and special and something we should cherish. And here’s why.
Unfair comparison
Swindon, with monotonous regularity, gets compared architecturally to Bristol, Bath and Cheltenham. And is found wanting in that comparison. But here’s the thing – and as I did in fact write in Secret Swindon: "Let’s go to Swindon for a spa break, said nobody ever. But let’s go to Swindon for jobs and economic prosperity said thousands." New Swindon appeared, almost overnight, as a Victorian town built to serve the newly-born cathedral to engineering that the GWR Works comprised. Ergo it was never going to have Georgian crescents or Regency arcades was it? It defeats me why anyone would expect it to.
So while we don’t have buildings with columns on like Bristol (and consider for a moment what paid for them) we do have buildings designed by people that many, with even the scantest architectural knowledge, have heard of. Norman Foster and the Spectrum Building for example. And Hugh Casson and the Wyvern Theatre. And then the David Murray John Tower and Douglas Stephen. Yeah - okay - I’ll come to him in a bit.
The DMJ: A Hi-Tech Building Gracing the Swindon Skyline
Often referred to as the Brunel Tower due to its location in the Brunel Centre, this behemoth of a building is in fact named after David Murray John – Clerk of Swindon Borough Council from 1938-1974 – the man who commissioned it. Sadly, he died before it was finished.
Murray John was an energetic council officer who undoubtedly had great vision. His efforts made a huge contribution to the influx of small industry into Swindon in the wake of WWII. But, like all visionaries, not all his ideas were good ones. For example, he had a notion to raze the railway village. That we still have most of it is down to the campaigning efforts of the poet, John Betjeman. Betjeman was a lover of, and passionate advocate for, Victorian architecture. And thank goodness for that. Otherwise we’d have lost our railway village and the nation and the world would have lost the glory that is St. Pancras station in London – amongst much else.
Built in the high-tech style, the DMJ stands as an exuberant exclamation mark that proudly proclaims itself across the Swindon skyline. At 83 metres high, the DMJ (along with Old Swindon’s Christ church) is the master of all it surveys.
The building struck me when I first moved to Swindon and I love it to this day.
Knowing even less at that time about architecture than I do now (and that’s not to say a great deal) it seemed to me to have something of a futuristic feel to it – though I couldn’t pin it to anything more specific than that. It’s only now, having researched the building a little, I understand what my subconscious was relating to.