Swindon in the Past Lane

Last year an exhibition of Ken White’s work opened at The Post Modern, Theatre Square, Swindon to celebrate the artists' 70th birthday. In the 1980s Swindon boasted a fine collection of Ken's murals - one at Cambria Bridge, the famous ‘Swindon Personalities’ in Union Street/Prospect Place, the King Class Locomotive Passing Through Swindon Railway Works at Henry Street, to name just a few. Sadly today just one mural now remains - the Golden Lion Bridge looking down Fleming Way. And even more disgraceful is the fact that Swindon does not own a piece of Ken White’s art.  Now how on earth can that be? In 2003 Advertiser journalist Shirley Mathias was asking exactly that question. Shirley wrote: ‘But the closest Ken has come to recognition by the borough was an invitation to hang two works in a display which is part of Think Art, an event sponsored by the borough’s Swindon Arts project together with, among other supporters, Nationwide, Westfield who own the Br...

The former Great Western Railway buildings in Swindon are rumoured to include a ghost or two, one of which apparently patrols the National Monuments Record building.  A model of Victorian efficiency, the Works complex contained a vast array of clocks and employed a clockwinder to maintain the various time pieces.  Legend has it that one such clockwinder climbed a spiral staircase in what was then a store room, to a door high in the eaves of the roof. From here he walked along one of the massive iron beams over which he threw a rope and hanged himself.   His ghost has been seen attempting to wind an absent clock in what has since been dubbed the haunted corridor and along which security guard dogs are reluctant to patrol. Today the imposing stone building overlooking the railway line accommodates the custodians of British history, but during the nineteenth century it accommodated the men who were actually making it. The GWR was very...

It was railway engineer Daniel Gooch who identified Swindon as the most suitable site for the much debated principal engine establishment in a letter to Brunel dated September 13, 1840. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Chief Engineer at the Great Western Railway, and Gooch worked on the design for a substantial engineering works for the maintenance and repair of locomotives. The land, approximately a mile to the north of the small market town of Swindon, was somewhat unprepossessing. 'The poorest in the neighbourhood; low lying, shallow soil on top of an endless depth of stiff clay, worthless for arable purposes, of small value for pasture, covered with furze, rushes and rowen,' according to local writer and naturalist Richard Jefferies. Once the workplace of boilermakers, brass finishers and toolmakers today 'V', 'O' and 'E' Shops are Grade II listed buildings and a modern day monument to merchandise.  The historic buildings built during the 1870s reign...