The Rolleston Arms on the corner of Curtis Street and Commercial Road is a Victorian building sitting almost on the brick arch road bridge that once spanned the Wilts and Berks Canal and was called unsurprisingly the Milton Road Bridge.
Adjoining the public house, and part of the same building, was the self-contained live music venue known as Level 3, so called because being on a gradient descending along Curtis Street it occupies the lower ground floor and is split over two levels. This arrangement had a stage area, dance floor and mezzanine viewing gallery with a total client capacity of 350. On one side of the pub there is the road, but semi-detached to this structure is a three bedroomed house also belonging the brewery owners, so all told a fairly substantial property.
The Rolleston Arms was named after the Rolleston estate owned by a Colonel William Rolleston who inherited the huge acreage belonging to the prominent local land owning Vilett family. But in 1880 the Colonel faced bankruptcy and in 1885 he put the estate on the market in line with a wider development of the estate lands. So between 1888 and 1901 a swathe of land stretching from Faringdon Road in the south and encompassing the central part of the Estate around what we now know as the town centre and on up to Eastcot Hill in the north encompassed the Rolleston Arms site mid-way as the land was covered with streets of brick terraces.
Local builder John Horsell constructed the Rolleston Arms Hotel with a bar and four rentable bedrooms and became the proprieter for eleven years first licensing the premises in 1891. Then in 1902 Charles Iles took over and the premises was continually licensed until 2013 with an odd occurrence in 2004 when the then manager Kevin Fitzgerald dug up a time capsule containing ‘small keepsakes from previous eras of the pub’ with frustratingly no further documented details.
Eventually, in 2013, a company going by the name of the Rolleston Arms Ltd took shape with a Martin Jones in charge but quickly went out of shape and just two years later the company was disolved and this apparently heralded a slow decline because worse was to come. In more recent years, for instance, the pub has seen several landlords, in fact four since 2022 when the crunch came and the building was sold.
Next door Level 3 which had already operated under several different names such as – The Furnace in 2012, Basement 73 in 2013, Level 3 again, The Underground in 2023, Levels in 2024 was renamed The Underground but then closed in 2024 for a few months only to be sold again less than a year later for safety reasons.
Whew! It has been claimed a dodgy structure was the safety measure which the freehold owners by this time Stonegate Brewery had failed to rectify. However, in March 2025 the venue reopened with plans to revive the live music, but that plan only lasted three months. Now, known affectionately by locals as The Rolly, the building awaits its fate with the Swindon Culture Collective campaigning to save the building from being re-puposed as flats calling it Swindon’s ‘most important music venue’.
Stonegate Brewery have since not actually sold the premises but are offering a ‘tenancy opportunity’ which will cost you nearly £13,000 upfront and nine hundred pounds rent a week along with other fees, but at least the place is still licensed.
Meanwhile, across the road the New Yorker nightclub at the top of Milton Road actually sat on the old Wilts and Berks canal bridge and has a nostalgic connection to the Rolleston. Originally the building was a warehouse for the canal, then did time as the law courts and by 1964 had evolved into the Central Club and Institute, a working men’s facility for educational, cultural and leisure activities becoming a discotheque in 1966.
It operated for barely two years when a compulsory purchase order snared it to make way for the proposed Brunel Centre and the empty building suffered fire damage and was demolished a few years later. It had also suffered from the tiny problem of the council having refused a liquor license for the disco because a significant portion of the clientelle were under 21, a huge no-no in those days. And this is where the Rolleston Arms came in with stories of New Yorker patrons using its bar for refreshment because it was, after all, just across the road.
Some revellers from the New Yorker have even recalled performers resorting to that same bar after completing their act and mingling with the party-goers. Sadly, the Rolly was boarded up in January 2004 but founder of Real Music UK music agency Daniel Roe is said to be hoping to take over the pub and Level 3 and bring it all back to life.
And that is a vision that should not be dismissed lightly. After all, in its early years Level 3 played host to many top bands of the day with the likes of The Fall (1997) and The Housemartins (1993) perhaps the most widely known, and more recently Bring Me The Horizon and Mastodon (2005) with Phil Campbell in 2023 being probably that last well-known act to play the venue before the output shifted towards DJ/club nights.
So, with hardcore and metal its dominent genres even the mighty BBC was inspired to remark it was ‘the nerve centre of alternative music’. And, in 2019 the Adver published an article stating: ‘the Furnace (Level 3) was one of the most thriving music venues in Swindon with people travelling into Swindon for metal and hardcore bands’.
Bands that have performed at Level 3
So when Daniel Roe said, ‘Our vision is to create a community hub for art, music and creativity in Swindon; a place for performers, for artists, for networking and of course to relax, have a drink and eat food’ he has a strong pedigree to build on.
And there are other moves afoot with several interested parties at least hoping to save the building from demoltion. And if that happened it would leave just Rolleston Street to carry on the name, a sort of legacy if you will. The Street was laid out in the late 1860s on land also owned by said William Rolleston and was developed on a field adjacent to Upper Eastcott Farm so handy to the shops in Old Town. There are no specifically listed buildings on Rolleston Street so it remains pretty much as a late-Victorian three-story terrace with basements just a stones throw from the Beehive pub overlooking what was the now defunct Regent Circus shopping and leisure complex.
It may be a somewhat unimportant question, but I wonder why the street and pub sharing a name and history weren’t in closer proximity bearing in mind Curtis Street, on which the Rolleston Arms sits, doesn’t have any individual giving rise to its origin – a mystery man.
But, with the pub’s future in abeyance, if we look on the bleak side and ignor the evidence of the many other pub closures which is going to hit record numbers this year, demolition or flats looks worryingly favourite outcomes, in which case perhaps if the building can be saved making flats not the worst option.
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