On your right, look for a pale concrete and glass building with a low, angular frontage and the Wyvern Theatre name fixed across the facade.
This is the Wyvern Theatre, Swindon’s six hundred and thirty-five seat indoor auditorium, and it opened in September, nineteen seventy-one as part of the Civic Centre designed by Casson, Conder and Partners. Its name reaches much further back than the building itself. A wyvern is a dragon-like creature with two legs and wings, and it once served as an emblem of the kings of Wessex. So this theatre carries a bit of local myth in its title... which is exactly the sort of thing a theatre ought to do.
Queen Elizabeth the Second and Prince Philip opened it on the seventh of September, nineteen seventy-one. The first performance came from a Ukrainian dance company, which feels like a strong opening note for a place meant to hold all sorts of voices, stories, and styles. If you glance at the image on your screen, you can catch that civic-centre look clearly: solid, practical, a little stern, and entirely uninterested in being fashionable.
But theatres are not really about concrete. They are about accumulated applause. Inside this building, generations of Swindon families learned the sacred rules of pantomime: cheer the hero, boo the villain, and abandon all standards of dignity before the interval. The Christmas shows became a proper local tradition, starting with Dick Whittington and His Cat in the first season and continuing through decades of Aladdin, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, and more. Familiar names kept turning up too, including Keith Chegwin, Adam Woodyatt, Michelle Collins, Anne Hegerty, and David Ashley, who seems to have logged enough appearances here to qualify for his own dressing room postcode.
The Wyvern also did something more important than hosting visiting stars. Its Summer Youth Project gave local young performers a serious stage for musicals like Bugsy Malone, Oliver!, West Side Story, Grease, Hairspray, Legally Blonde, and The Wizard of Oz. That kind of tradition keeps a theatre alive. The backstage photo in the app shows the less glamorous magic behind the curtain: the working spaces, the hidden effort, the machinery of make-believe.
The building has had its own dramatic turns. In two thousand and six, inspectors found traces of asbestos in the offices and roof void, the concealed space beneath the roof structure. The theatre shut for about a year, then used the pause for a one point three million pound refurbishment, adding new decor, bars, cafes, disabled entrances, and new seating. It closed again during the coronavirus disease pandemic, C-O-V-I-D nineteen, and reopened between August and September, twenty twenty-one. Swindon Borough Council owns the theatre, and Trafalgar Entertainment has operated it since twenty twenty-one.
Its future is still being argued over. In twenty nineteen, the council said structural and maintenance reports suggested the building could reach the end of its life by twenty twenty-seven without major investment. By September, twenty twenty-four, proposals had appeared for a larger multi-purpose theatre on the bus station site, while this building would stay and be repurposed for community arts groups. Not a final curtain, then... more of a cast change.
If you need it later, the box office is generally open Monday to Saturday from eleven in the morning to five in the afternoon, and it is closed on Sunday.
The Wyvern shows how a town gives itself a stage, then spends decades filling it with memory.
When you are ready, head on to the Museum of Computing, where Swindon's next surprise is all circuits and code.
