Then and Now - Cirencester

I remember a coach trip to Cirencester in the 1960s. It was an awful long way from London and we parked in the Forum. It was near the source of the Thames so why did we trawl the shops for an hour instead of going to see a muddy spring somewhere? I didn't quite get the point of going all that way for that but I was intrigued by the fact that even the most mundane wall was made of Cotswold stone instead of the bricks that I was used to. And 45 years later I find myself living down the road from Cirencester with an handful of transparencies from that era.
The Romans built the Tetbury road almost completely straight and so it stayed until the 20th century. Then an airfield cut it in two and the Cirencester end had a bypass built. The discarded fragment of the Tetbury road is still straight but doesn't go very far and used to look like this:

From Box-G6

nowadays full of parked cars

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

The building at the end of the Roman road was the Petty Sessional Court and Police Station. By the time that Peter Coleman took the picture it was occupied by Avonprint.

From G2721

Nowadays an estate agent for the wealthy.

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

Why did a busy town like Cirencester lose both of its railway stations? A lot of commuters end up having to go to Kemble to catch a London train. Here is the station probably having been closed a few years earlier.

From Box-G6

And here is the station not changed much at all apart from the canopy being missing.

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

The Blue School on a bright summer morning.

From Box-G6

Trees are trying to take over. Also we found that the road was really difficult to cross, being infested with many expensive German sports cars.

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

The plaque used to look like this

From G2721

But it has been repainted with different text and it is very faded. In Feb 2011 the newspapers said that this building would be converted into flats.

From 2010-02-12Cirencester