This church building came to our notice in May 2015 when a War Memorial to former pupils of the Sabbath School was found in a garden in Gorse Hill, Swindon.  The church had closed many years before so a new home for the memorial needed to be found and after an article appeared in the local paper, Swindon's war historian Mark Sutton arranged for it to be moved to the Radnor Street Cemetery Chapel.

We discovered the church had long since closed and in more recent years had been the Bangladesh Youth & Community Centre, but that too had closed and the building was to be sold.  We thought we should take a few photographs before any work began.

A couple of years on from those photographs, the building work is now complete, residents have moved in and it has a new name - St. Paul's Court.  Presumably the name of 'St. Paul' is from the name of the road - 'St. Paul's Street' - running almost along the side of it.  There are thirteen flats plus a new-build coach-house over the vehicular entrance to the site.  One of the new residents contacted us to tell us there are some foundation stones on the outside of the building so we duly popped over and took some photographs.

Residents of Swindon are used to buildings of their heritage knocked down and new flats being built on the site so it is nice to see this time the original building is still intact.  In fact, from the outside at least, the conversion looks to have been done very sympathetically - round and arched windows can still be seen with their brickwork left in place, and the new window frames blend in well.  If our opinion is worth anything, we are in praise that this conversion is successful and that it hopefully means the future of this building is now secure.

A photograph of the church from 1900 can be seen at the  Swindon Viewpoint  website.

Please note:  It has been rather difficult to know quite how to display our photographs of this building, there being three 'time-zones' involved - before, during and after the re-development.  We hope we won't confuse you as we jump from one to another - looking under each photo to see the date it was taken may help.