Swindon in the Past Lane

Today it is difficult to picture the former GWR Park on Faringdon Road without it's splendid railings, yet it is a mere four years ago since the installation of the new ironmongering. A £200,000 developer funded project was announced in March 2009 and the final section along Church Place was finished in the summer of 2010. The park project generated an interest in the distinctive Victorian blue brick capping on the walls stamped with the imprint Joseph Hamblet from West Bromwich and canal historian Janet Flanagan contacted me about a former boatman Bill Cutler. Bill was born in 1895, a third generation boatman, and in 1969 the Advertiser interviewed him. He told of working on his father's two horse-drawn narrow boats called Lea and Rea, bringing bricks and brewery sugar from his native West Bromwich to Swindon. "It was a lovely life," he told the Advertiser. "Peaceful, yet you were doing some hard work." The Cutler Family connections in the Mi...

Ken White’s Golden Lion Bridge mural is a focal point in Swindon town centre, just as the bridge itself once was. Local artist Ken White first painted the mural on the side of a terraced house in Medgbury Road in 1976 as part of a job creation scheme for Thamesdown Arts.  Based on a 19 th century photograph, Ken added his own touch with representations of hammerman poet Alfred Williams and bridge builder Brunel.  Repainted in 1983, Ken spruced up the mural in 2009 and with the recent demolition of the Whalebridge Roundabout in Fleming Way it is once again on full view. The elaborate iron lift bridge depicted in the mural was built in the GWR works in 1870, replacing the original wooden swing bridge over the Wilts and Berks Canal.   Its neighbouring pedestrian footbridge, paid for by public subscription, was added in 1877. Once a farm track leading from Upper Eastcott, the main road through New Swindon, soon became known as Bridge Street whi...

Today the infamous Magic Roundabout is probably one of the busiest junctions in Swindon. At the beginning of the 19th century a different method of transport stopped close by at the site of the Swindon wharf, although this traffic was considerably slower. In 1826 William Cobbett, 19th century radical politician, travelled through Swindon on one of his famous fact finding journeys across Britain. Surveying the Wilts and Berks Canal, Cobbett remarked on the 'gentleman's house, with coach house, stables, walled in garden, paddock, and the rest of those things, which, all together, make up a villa,' and supposed that the canal earned prodigious profits. In fact the canal was never particularly successful and was at its busiest, somewhat ironically, during the 1830s when it conveyed vast quantities of materials to build the Great Western Railway. The GWR itself once considered buying the canal for £20,000. In 1894 the United Commercial Syndicate was another possible ...