Work is underway to give a closed Swindon restaurant a new lease of life.
The Pizza Hut at Shaw Ridge closed suddenly in late January 2025 and has remained empty ever since.
McDonald’s submitted plans, which were later approved by Swindon Borough Council in February 2026, to partially knock down the building and convert the rest of the site into a hot food takeaway and drive-thru.
Just over a month after it was given the green light, the fast food chain has now fenced off the car park of the old pizza place as the conversion work begins.
Large piles of rubble and detritus has been dumped near a skip on one side of the car park, with small shipping containers and portaloos nearby, along with a solar panel leaning on a stand.
Some of the furniture and fittings from inside the building have been left near the front entrance, which still features Pizza Hut signage.
The main building will be gutted of all internal walls and will be made shorter than the existing building; the roof line would also be changed, removing the “hut” appearance of the mansard roof with a smaller, wide, flat roof where a ridge would normally be.
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The floor plan does not show any seating area or division between a customer area and kitchen. The fact that the application specified the new use will be a “takeaway” and does not add the word restaurants suggests it may be only used for takeaway and drive-thru customers and possibly delivery services.
All the tables, chairs, drinks machines, salad stations, and other equipment have been removed, along with the flooring, though the old wallpaper remains.
Part of the foundation appears to have been dug up, with large cracks visible from the windows.
As well as creating a drive-thru route, McDonalds has permission to cut 16 parking spaces, reducing them from 45 to 29.
Nearby businesses feared that this would cause long queues of traffic that block the main entrance into the leisure park and prevent or delay their customers in accessing the rest of the area, as well as cause congestion on Whitehill Way.
More than three dozen residents wrote in to planners about McDonalds’ proposal, nearly all of them opposed.
