On your left stands a long pale stone and brick civic block with rounded Moderne corners, flat bands of windows, and a confident nineteen-thirties frontage that looks determined to stay modern forever.
This is Museum and Art Swindon, and its latest chapter is a neat little story of survival. The collection began in nineteen forty-four, when local benefactor H-J-P Bomford gave the town a substantial donation of artworks. For years, people came to Apsley House to see them, along with displays on Swindon’s Jurassic geology, Roman connections, and local social history. Then things stalled. Apsley House closed in March twenty twenty during the pandemic, and by the summer of twenty twenty-one the council decided the building needed major repairs and no longer suited the museum. So the collection went into storage... which is never a glamorous sentence in museum history.
In July twenty twenty-four, it reopened here after Swindon Borough Council spent five hundred and twenty thousand pounds converting the first floor of these Civic Offices. If you glance at your screen, the image shows this streamlined exterior clearly. Historic England calls the building, completed in nineteen thirty-nine, a striking and well-realised Moderne design. That means sleek curves, long horizontal lines, and a faith in progress poured into architecture.
Inside, the focus is twentieth- and twenty-first-century British art: names like Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Ben Nicholson, L-S Lowry, and Grayson Perry, alongside photography and studio pottery. If you want to go in, it opens Tuesday to Saturday from ten thirty to four thirty, and stays closed on Sundays and Mondays.
So this place is less a dusty storehouse than a collection that refused to disappear. When you’re ready, continue on to Holy Rood Church for another kind of Swindon memory.
