A doctor with a builder’s hands
Dick Squires followed his father into medicine, training at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, where he met his wife Kirsty, then a nurse. After posts in Shoreham, Chichester and Banbury he became a GP in Wantage, practising from the Church Street surgery until 1986. He had grown up in the town, and his family were friends and neighbours of John and Penelope Betjeman; as a young man he drove a group including Penelope overland to India in a converted camper van.
A love of old buildings, and carpentry skills learned at school, led to what he called his ‘barn madness’. Beginning in the early 1970s he rescued a series of redundant farm buildings and gave them new community uses, raising money, persuading owners and councils and doing much of the work with volunteers.
Lains Barn
In the late 1970s he acquired a large, partly collapsed barn with Victorian cow byres near Ardington from its owners for a nominal sum and restored it as a community space. Lains Barn is now a wedding and events venue whose income helps fund the Vale and Downland Museum.
The Vale and Downland Museum
When the Church Street surgery moved to a new health centre in the 1970s, he saw the old surgery, a timber-framed house remodelled in 1780, as a home for the town’s small museum collection. Money from several sources, including the partners and his own funds, bought the building, and from June 1977 he led eight years of volunteer building work: a new entrance and café, a timber-framed gallery wing, and a seventeenth-century barn brought from Hendred and re-erected. Much of the building money came from Kirsty’s catering at Lains Barn. The museum was opened by the Duchess of Devonshire on 29 September 1983. The Squires Room in the museum is named after him.
Court Hill and the Betjeman projects
On the Ridgeway above Wantage, in Letcombe Regis parish, he re-erected the frames of old timber barns given by local farms on a former quarry site. The result opened as a youth hostel, YHA Ridgeway, in April 1987, and has run independently as the Court Hill Centre since 2007. Later he helped lead the campaign to save land beside Letcombe Brook, which became the Betjeman Millennium Park in 2002, and the fundraising for the bust of Sir John Betjeman unveiled at the museum in 2016.
What to see
- Vale and Downland Museum, Church Street, Wantage.
- Court Hill Centre, Court Hill Road, on the Ridgeway south of Wantage: café, bunkhouse and camping.
- Lains Barn, near Ardington (private venue).
- Betjeman Millennium Park, beside Letcombe Brook, Wantage.