Today bankers might head the list of people we most like to hate, but in 18th century Swindon you couldn’t find one for love nor money. At the beginning of the following century banks were private and frequently family affairs.

In Swindon the Strange family had a finger in many pies and were drapers, farmers and coal and salt merchants before they turned their hand to banking.

In 1800 James Strange occupied two cottages owned by Thomas Coventry situated next to the Goddard Arms Hotel and formerly occupied by Swindon surgeon Joseph Gay. It was here that the family opened Strange, Garrett, Strange and Cook in 1807.

The bank changed its name to James & Richard Strange & Co then, following James’s death in 1826, it became Thomas & Richard Strange & Co.

The Strange bank was eventually taken over by the County of Gloucester Banking Company in 1842.

“In due course the bank was removed from its old position, adjoining the drapery shop of Mr Thomas Strange, to new premises which had been specially erected on the site of an old house which had been in the occupation of Mr Joseph Gay, Surgeon,” Advertiser founder William Morris wrote in Swindon, Reminiscences, Notes And Relics Of Ye Old Wiltshire Towne.

“I have watched new bank after new bank arise in Swindon, each one apparently striving to be more grand and imposing than the last,” wrote an unimpressed Morris.

These rare photographs, dated August 1899, show builders demolishing the two properties which had served as Swindon’s first High Street Bank. The County of Gloucestershire Banking Company had been taken over by Lloyds in 1897 and, as these photographs reveal, work on the Swindon branch of Lloyds was under way just two years later.

In the 1901 census the building at 3 and 5 High Street consisted of the Capital Bank and house occupied by bank manager Thomas Byrch and also Lloyds Bank and house where Lytleton Etty was the manager.

Still occupied by Lloyds 111 years later, the Ashlar limestone building with arcaded windows and pilasters and bracketed cornice is a Grade II-listed building. Pasted on the builder’s hording around the 1899 site is an advertisement for a neighbouring Old Town business, Horder Brothers, Drapers & Milliners who were having a summer sale, disposing of “a large stock of reliable goods at popular prices.”

Albert Horder moved from his shop in Shaftesbury, Dorset, to Swindon in the early 1870s. By 1891 the business at 9 High Street employed Albert’s two sons Edward and Arthur, with Elizabeth Wynn, Mary E Wean and Gertrude Crome all working as drapers’ assistants.

Horder Mews, overlooking the entrance to the Lawns, is built on the site of Albert’s drapers shop.