LONG-TIME Old Town resident, Vivienne Jones, planted a tree in her own street yesterday to start a community project to green-up the area.

Mrs Jones, 85, a grandmother-of-one, who has lived in the same house in Prospect Hill for most of her life, performed the ceremony to mark the start of the Greening of Eastcott initiative.

The native alder replaces one originally planted 30 years ago as part of Swindon Council’s Dover Street to Prospect general development scheme, but was vandalised in the 1990s.

Mrs Jones said: “I was quite surprised and quite honoured to be asked really. I said why me and they said you are one of the oldest residents in this area. My family have been here for about 100 years in the same house. I think it’s an excellent project and I hope they will continue with it.”

Mrs Jones, a retired teacher, said her family first moved into the house when her grandfather Alfred Hobson, an architect, came to Swindon from Bath to help design the GWR works.

She was born in the house, moving to Tockenham, near Royal Wootton Bassett, when she married her husband, Dennis, in 1958, before moving back after his death in 1998.

She said: “I remember the days when the lamplighter men used to come along and light the street lamps on the corners, because there was no electricity at all. There was just gas and oil lamps for lighting.

“The street lamps were gas so you used to see the street lighter come up in the evening, put up his ladder and light the gas. There were no telephones, radios were rare and there were no TVs.

“There used to be gipsies coming around selling bunches of snowdrops or violets or watercress. And there was the muffin man with tray of muffins on his head.”

The Greening of Eastcott is a two to three-year initiative, intended to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and is a joint project between the community groups Back Garden, Queen’s Park Community Council, and Kingshill Area Residents’ Association.

The next stage will be to produce a costed plan and gain funding for the project, which is hoped to include the planting of more trees, urban gardens and allotments, and environmental education schemes in local schools.

Peter Green, the chairman of Back Garden, said: “We’re doing it because there’s several of us who think urban areas are lovely and it’s nice to have some greenery in it. This seemed an appropriate time to start for the jubilee.”

Coun Dave Wood (Lib Dem, Eastcott) said: “These streets, being Victorian streets, having green was not seen as being particularly important at that time. I think when people walk out of their doors and see green as opposed to concrete, it lifts people’s moods.”