A new cafe and splash park at Coate Water Country Park are among the big projects the council wants to complete this year. 

A new cafe has been in the works for the popular outdoor destination since 2020.

The new splash park became necessary when the existing one reached the end of its life and was eventually condemned in the summer of last year. 

Swindon Borough Council has now provided a rough update revealing that both of these developments could be finished and available for the local public to use by summer this year. 

In a post on its Facebook page, the council said: "2023 was a big year for the Council, and 2024 is set to be even bigger!

"Over the next 12 months, we’ll have a number of projects already underway being completed."

As well as the splash park replacement and new cafe set for the summer, the council has indicated that the museum and art gallery, the station road improvement scheme and the Moredon Sporting Hub would all be opened by spring. 

In September, plans for the cafe were revealed, confirming that it would be an Art Deco structure similar to one from a nearby town's park. 

Councillor Chris Watts told colleagues at a cabinet that the cafe would be a in an appropriate retro style, matching the park’s famous 1930s diving board.

He said: ”We’re going to install an art deco café at Coate Water, the same as the one the Cheltenham Trust uses at Pittville Pump Rooms.

“It’s rather like an orangery in a retro style.”

Cllr Watts added: “The great thing about it is it’s a temporary structure, even though it looks so good, so it’s easy and quick to install. And you can test the business model and if it works, you can think about something more permanent.”

Also in September, a survey from Swindon Borough Council revealed there were plans for the closed park to potentially be replaced with a hybrid paddling pool/splash park combination or even a beach. 

The area that the out-of-use splash park currently sits in used to be home to a paddling pool.

But the pool had become dilapidated and so plans were made to replace it with a £120,000 splash park, which opened in June 2012. 

And over ten years later that splash park was breaking down regularly with multiple outages seeing it out of use before the decision was eventually made that it would cost too much to fix and needed to be replaced.