ON the last day of November 42 years ago, the Swindon Advertiser told tales of two buildings.

One had yet to be built and the other had been built many years before but was now under threat – which made the then Poet Laureate very unhappy.

“It’s Sky High For Brunel,” said our front page headline.

The accompanying photograph looks very much like the David Murray John Building and its town centre surroundings but shows a model. The tower wouldn’t be built until 1976.

In 1973 it didn’t even have a name. It would eventually be named in tribute to the visionary town clerk credited with engineering Swindon’s post-war prosperity, but David Murray John’s death didn’t occur until the following year.

We said: “Foundations have been laid for a skyscraper tower block, the highest commercial building in Wiltshire, planned as the crowning glory for Swindon’s Brunel shopping centre.

“It will soar to nearly 250 feet, dwarfing other county landmarks, second in height only to the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. The topmost of the 23 storeys will be about twice as high as the Hambro building in Fleming Way, and half the height of London’s famous Post Office Tower.”

The other building we wrote about that day was the Baptist Tabernacle.

“Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman has joined in the fight to save Swindon’s historic Baptist Tabernacle from demolition,” we said. “In October 1972 Wiltshire County Council gave notice that the Grecian-style church – built in 1886 – was to be pulled down to make way for new shops and offices adjacent to the Temple Court development.”

A year on, with the Department of the Environment yet to make a decision on the plan, Sir John weighed in with a letter to Whitehall.

“I have known Swindon well since I was 20,” he said. The only building left below the old town is the Baptist Tabernacle. It should be kept as a hall. It really is to Swindon what St Paul’s is to London as far as architecture is concerned.”

As we all know, his protestations fell on deaf ears, and the building was gone before the end of the decade.

When last heard of, its frontage lay in pieces under tarpaulins at the Wroughton airfield site.

To date, the closest it has come to being reassembled was when an artist failed to secure planning permission to include it in a new house.