In 1986 my husband moved to Swindon. After several years of unemployment, he left me and our two young children living in the coastal town in Pembrokeshire where he had grown up and where there was no work, to try his luck in Swindon. We were so desperate as a family that he came not to paid employment, but as a volunteer with Swindon Cyrenians, a charitable organisation that worked with homeless people. The Swindon Cyrenians hostel was based in four terrace houses at the bottom of Farnsby Street while several of the volunteers were accommodated in a property in the railway village at No 1 Oxford Street. A settlement in Old Swindon dates back millennia but New Swindon, the former industrial complex at the bottom of the hill, is barely 178 years old, and the town itself continues to this day to be a work in progress. Farnsby Street today looks very different even to the place Steve came to in 1986. The four houses, all that remained of the Victorian s...