An oil painting by Mike Jeffries depicting GreatWestern Railway Churchward 4-6-0 No 4003 Lode Star, running along the Brunel’s South Devon Railway sea wall at Dawlish in the early 1930s. The locomotive, the only survivor of its class, is one of the star exhibits in the National Railway Museum at York. COURTESY NATIONAL RAILWAY MUSEUM.
INTRODUCTION:
The town that shaped a world
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Swindon today: the butt of jokes in Ricky Gervais’ BBC comedy, The Office, in which it became the head office of Wernham Hogg paper merchants.
Portrayed as a bland, soulless sea of warehouses and computer firms, Swindon housed the fictional firm’s head office of the branch in which the comedy was set, on the slightly less bland, soulless Slough Trading Estate. A town with a football club, which won the League Cup in 1969, briefly reached the dizzy heights of the Premiership and in May 2007 won promotion to League One. A place where Honda cars are turned out by the million to award-winning Japanese designs. Somewhere bypassed by the M4, which carries those who are in a hurry to get from west to east or vice versa.
A forgettable everyday medieval market town that grew out of a village whose name meant either “pigs’ hill” or ‘Sweyn’s hill’, after a local Saxon landowner. A town which changed the face of the globe forever and developed transport technology years ahead of its time, paving the way for continents to be opened up to international trade, and spreading the benefits of Britain’s Industrial Revolution far and wide.
This last one is the real Swindon. It formed the hub of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway and was where a series of workshops produced groundbreaking locomotive designs, where rolling stock jumped off the drawing board on to the production line. The town of Swindon emerged to serve a mushrooming network of lines, which stretched from Paddington to Penzance and up to west Wales, the west Midlands and the Mersey. This network was affectionately known as God’s Wonderful Railway, and was considered by many to be the best in the world.
Swindon was the town where thousands toiled to turn steel and copper into legends. The Stars, Castles and Kings. Not to mention the Saints, the Halls, the Granges, the Counties, the Aberdares, the prairies and the panniers. Products that would fire the imagination decades after the steam era and the great Swindon works had come to an end.
A town synonymous with a global technological watershed, of which every resident, past, present and future has a right to be justifiably proud.
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