Swindon Borough Council has completed improvements to the seating area outside Poundstretcher in Regent Street, restoring and revarnishing the benches, installing new flower planters, fitting protective fencing around the solitary tree, and creating a new planting bed. The work was finished and shared on the council's Facebook page this week.
The council described the result as giving the area a refreshed and more welcoming feel, and said the project builds on August's Big Town Centre Clean Up, which saw council staff, volunteers, local businesses and community groups come together for litter picking, planting and the restoration of street furniture. Seasonal flower displays are promised for the new bed in future, pending, it is understood, further flowers.
Residents gathered outside Poundstretcher this week to inspect the refurbished seating, with several reportedly sitting down on it for slightly longer than strictly necessary to shop, out of what one passer by described as civic appreciation, and another described as it being quite a nice bench now, actually.
A council spokesperson confirmed the fencing around the tree was a protective measure, rather than, as one local had speculated, an attempt to contain it before it got any ideas. The tree declined to comment, having had quite enough excitement for one autumn.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she had made a special trip into town on the bus to sit on the newly varnished bench and give it her verdict. 'It's very shiny,' she said. 'In my day a bench was just a bench. You didn't need a council Facebook post to tell you it was welcoming. You could feel it was welcoming with your own bottom.' She added that she was not one to gossip, but understood the planters had already attracted the attention of a man from Even Swindon who keeps trying to take cuttings.
Gary Tench, Area Manager at Tench Paper Solutions in Westlea, said the Regent Street project had given him a new way of describing his own suggestion to re-imagine the breakout area at work. 'They've gone benches, planters, bit of fencing, call it a town centre transformation,' he said. 'I said to Julie, that's basically what I've been proposing for the kettle corner since March. New pot plant, lick of paint on the skirting, and suddenly it's a wellbeing hub. Nobody listens until a council does it.' He confirmed he has already drafted a Facebook post.
By Thursday, word had spread that the bench refurbishment might be the first phase of something larger, prompting speculation among shoppers about what phase two could possibly involve. A council statement clarified there were, at present, no further announcements, though it did not rule anything out, on the basis that ruling things out is itself a kind of commitment nobody wants to make before Christmas.
Those hoping for a ribbon cutting, a brass band or at minimum a small plaque will be disappointed. The bench, like the tree, has simply resumed sitting there, doing what benches do, only now with noticeably less peeling varnish and a faint, lingering smell that several shoppers have optimistically described as newness.