Published in Windlesora 18 (2000)
© WLHG
This attractively-illustrated book brings together the valuable work Margaret Gilson has been engaged in for some years, researching and publishing in Old Windsor parish magazine accounts of over fifty of the most notable buildings of the village (her inclusion of such places as Cumberland Lodge and Royal Lodge is perhaps controversial, though they belonged originally to the parish). At the heart of the book are the farms, churches and pubs of the village, and the grand houses which once gave Old Windsor its character but which have almost all now been divided up into flats, their once-extensive grounds becoming sites for yet more flats or other housing.
Inevitably some of the buildings described prove more interesting to read about than others. Woodside, now the property of Elton John, has the longest history of any domestic building in Old Windsor, going back to the eleventh century, but its story is largely a list of owners whose names mean very little. At the other end of the social scale however, Margaret Gilson’s account of the Union Workhouse brings English social history of the nineteenth century vividly before us. It is good to know that the Old Windsor workhouse (which served the area generally) was a more caring place than that portrayed by Dickens in Oliver Twist.
Buildings of Old Windsor is most memorable when stories can be told of the people who lived in them: eccentric Dickie Bateman who created The Priory, Waterloo veteran Thomas Evans who started the Oxford Blue pub, or ‘The Green Man’, the gentlemanly down-and-out who was housed in a shed by a kindly Armenian. There are also intriguing details about tolls collected on the river and offerings given at the church, a windowless room in the old vicarage, a Hermit’s Hut which became a trysting place for lovers, and a good variety of ghosts.
This book is sure to appeal to everyone in Old Windsor but it will be of interest to others in providing a portrait of a community whose evolving history is reflected in its buildings. The line drawings and water colours which accompany the text and depict the buildings as they are today give the book distinctive character.
Hester Davenport
GILSON, Margaret, Buildings of Old Windsor, published by the author in 1999, 112 pages, illustrated, £5.75.
Windsor Local History Group 