Brunel Houses
Nothing now remains of Steventon station except the two substantial stone houses, known locally as the ‘Brunel houses’ and popularly supposed to have been designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel himself. They were certainly built under his authority and with the general outline designed by himself, but he was almost certainly too busy with all the other aspects of the development of the Great Western Railway, which reached Steventon in 1840, to have carried out the detailed work himself, which was probably done by J H Gandell, the Resident Engineer for the Reading to Swindon section. Station House, now divided into two dwellings, namely Station House and The Sycamores, was the Superintendent’s House and also served as the Board Room for the G.W.R. for a short time from July 1842 to January 1843. In April 1840 Brunel had instructed Gandell to enlarge the house ‘because Mr Bell with a dozen children cannot live in the house I had proposed’. The other house, now known as Brook House, was originally the Station Hotel.
