The predecessor of the Reading Room was the original Swan Inn, seen in the picture below, from Dave Stevens' collection ~ it appears in the trade directories for 1871 and 1875 and on the OS map of 1889, but was burnt down shortly afterwards.
The building was still a WI Hall in 1982, when the Estate voiced hopes that the WI would move to the Strangways Hall, so that the Reading Room could be "let for a workshop enterprise"; then it became a workshop for Mr Hickmott, an upholsterer.
John Skinner opened it as his studio in 1991, and lived through an outcry in 1994, when he placed a large nude male figure in the garden; overnight, it was clothed in a nappy, and eventually made to face discreetly away from the road, but not before the furore attracted the attention of Auberon Waugh in the Daily Telegraph. A similar figure attracted comment nearly 10 years later, but sensitivities were not so readily moved on that occasion. John Skinner moved to the south of France in 2005, and the studio is now operated by John Meaker, who continues the tradition of running day courses.
Not clearly visible in either of the above photos is the square bracket mounted on a stout pole in the studio ~ the last vestige of the paraffin street lights that once graced the village before they were dismantled in 1943 and the glass put to use in a local greenhouse. One of the brackets can be seen, however, in the older view just above. The village voted in favour of an offer of electric street lighting, until the costs were made known, when a second vote overturned the first, and the village has remained light-less ever since.
(Scheduled in the 1974 Village Plan as a building which the Secretary of State had agreed to include in the statutory list)
It was replaced in 1890 by the Reading Room (men only!) and the terrace to its left (nos 7 to 11). James Knight appears in the 1881 census as a blacksmith and licensed victualler, and again in the 1891 census as an innkeeper, but Phoebe Cosins, listed in 1881 as an infant school mistrss had, by 1891 become "charge of club in reading room."(Many thanks to Dave Stevens for the loan of the Victorian photo from his collection.)
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