THESE 83-year-old photographs are murky enough to cause eye strain, but we hope Rewind readers won’t mind too much.

The original prints, let alone the fragile glass negatives an Adver photographer would have used to make them in 1936, do not survive.

The images are among several which appeared during February that year, all of them depicting building projects or the sites of future building projects.

It seems the mood of the town in the weeks following the accession of a young new King, Edward VIII, was one of looking toward an exciting future.

Our main picture shows Victoria Road in the midst of a widening scheme, and the photographer seems to have been in an elevated position outside the Victoria pub. Perhaps they leaned precariously from an upper window.

The nearest building seen on the right is the one which was occupied for many years by the Hickmans electrical goods business, and which will shortly be home to a shop for tabletop gamers.

Next to it is what is now Jack’s Bar and Grill, and beyond that is the Post Office building which had been completed and dedicated the previous year.

In the distance is the looming silhouette of the old Congregational Church, whose presence, along with that of certain shops, caused the bottleneck the widening scheme was intended to relieve.

Although many people had not expected the church to survive the process, it was not demolished until 1949, and the site is now occupied by the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery.

The cleared land at the right of the image was later occupied by the Art Deco-influenced building which stands there to this day.

A familiar pub also stands in the foreground of our other image.

It is, of course, The Rifleman, whose building is now home to a buffet restaurant.

The shops next to it are long forgotten, and our caption noted that they would soon be demolished to make way for Swindon’s seventh cinema - which these days is the Savoy pub.

Other Adver stories in February of 1936 detailed various building and civil engineering projects.

At Coate Water, the final touches were being made to an open air swimming pool, while in Pleydell Road road crews were remodelling the surface and drains in a bid to combat flooding.

At the Town Gardens, the bandstand was being modified into a shelter with seating for patrons.