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Swindon

Town in Wiltshire, England

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Recorded in the 1086 Domesday Book as Suindune, the arrival of the Great Western Railway in 1843 transformed it from a small market town of 2,500 into a thriving railway hub that would become one of the largest railway engineering complexes in the world at its peak. This brought with it pioneering amenities such as the UK's first lending library and a 'cradle-to-grave' healthcare centre that was later used as a blueprint for the NHS. Swindon's railway heritage can be primarily seen today with the Grade II listed Railway Village and STEAM Museum. The Swindon Designer Outlet is housed in the renovated former works, and the Brunel Shopping Centre is one of several places in Swindon that bear the name of the famous engineer generally acknowledged with bringing the railways to the town.

Despite the subsequent decline and closure of its railway works, Swindon was one of the fastest growing towns in Europe post-war as its economy diversified, attracting large international companies, who made use of its burgeoning population and strategic transport links.

Major venues in the town include the Wyvern Theatre and the Mechanics' Institute. Lydiard Park has hosted festivals such as BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend, while the Swindon Mela, an all-day celebration of South Indian arts and culture, attracts up to 10,000 visitors a year. The ancient Ridgeway, known as Britain's oldest road, runs a few miles to Swindon's south, with Avebury, the largest megalithic stone circle in the world, and Uffington White Horse, Britain's oldest white horse figure, also nearby. Wiltshire's only professional football club, Swindon Town, have played in the Premier League in the 1993–94 season and won a major trophy, securing a famous giant-killing victory over Arsenal in the 1969 League Cup final. They currently play in League Two at the 15,000-seat County Ground in the town centre. Other sports in the town include Swindon Wildcats Ice Hockey and five-time British speedway champions the Swindon Robins.

History

Middle Ages

The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Swindon sat in a defensible position atop a limestone hill. It is referred to in the 1086 Domesday Book as Suindune, believed to be derived from the Old English words "swine" and "dun" meaning "pig hill" or possibly Sweyn's hill, Sweyn being a Scandinavian name akin to Sven and English swain, meaning a young man.

Swindon is recorded in the Domesday Book as a manor in the hundred of Blagrove, Wiltshire. It was one of the larger manors, recorded as having 27 households and a rent value of £10 14s, which was divided among five landlords. Before the Battle of Hastings the Swindon estate was owned by an Anglo-Saxon thane called Leofgeat. After the Norman Conquest, Swindon was split into five holdings: the largest was held between Miles Crispin and Odin the Chamberlain, and the second by Wadard, a knight in the service of Odo of Bayeux, brother of the king. The manors of Westlecot, Walcot, Rodbourne, Moredon and Stratton are also listed; all are now part of Swindon.

The Goddard family were lord of the manor from the 16th century for many generations, living at the manor house, sometimes known as The Lawn.

Swindon was a small market town, mainly for barter trade, until roughly 1848. This original market area is on top of the hill in central Swindon, now known as Old Town.

The Industrial Revolution was responsible for an acceleration of Swindon's growth. Construction of the Wilts and Berks Canal in 1810 and the North Wilts Canal in 1819 brought trade to the area, and Swindon's population started to grow.

Railway town

Between 1841 and 1842, Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Swindon Works was built for the repair and maintenance of locomotives on the Great Western Railway (GWR). The GWR built a small railway village to house some of its workers. The Museum of the Great Western Railway and English Heritage, including the English Heritage Archive, now occupy part of the old works. In the village were the GWR Medical Fund Clinic at Park House and its hospital, both on Faringdon Road, and the 1892 health centre in Milton Road, which housed clinics, a pharmacy, laundries, baths, Victorian Turkish baths and swimming pools, which were almost opposite.

From 1871, GWR workers had a small amount deducted from their weekly pay and put into a healthcare fund; GWR doctors could prescribe them or their family members medicines or send them for medical treatment. In 1878 the fund began providing artificial limbs made by craftsmen from the carriage and wagon works, and nine years later opened its first dental surgery. In his first few months in post, the dentist extracted more than 2,000 teeth. From the opening in 1892 of the health centre, a doctor could also prescribe a haircut or even a bath. The cradle-to-grave extent of this service was later used as a blueprint for the NHS.

The Mechanics' Institute, formed in 1844, moved into a building that looked rather like a church and included a covered market on 1 May 1855. The New Swindon Improvement Company, a co-operative, raised the funds for this programme of self-improvement and paid the GWR £40 a year for its new home on a site at the heart of the railway village. It was a groundbreaking organisation that transformed the railway's workforce into some of the country's best-educated manual workers.

The Mechanics' Institute had the UK's first lending library, put on a range of improving lectures, and arranged various other activities such as access to a theatre, ambulance classes and xylophone lessons. A former institute secretary formed the New Swindon Co-operative Society in 1853, which, after a schism in the society's membership, spawned the New Swindon Industrial Society, which ran a retail business from a stall in the market at the institute. The institute also nurtured pioneering trade unionists and encouraged local democracy.

When tuberculosis hit the new town, the Mechanics' Institute persuaded the industrial pioneers of North Wiltshire to agree that the railway's former employees should continue to receive medical attention from the doctors of the GWR Medical Society Fund, which the institute had played a role in establishing and funding.

In 1874, a skeleton of the stegosaurian dinosaur Dacentrurus was excavated from Swindon Great Quarry.

Swindon's other railway, the Swindon, Marlborough and Andover Railway, merged with the Swindon and Cheltenham Extension Railway to form the Midland & South Western Junction Railway, which set out to join the London & South Western Railway with the Midland Railway at Cheltenham. The Swindon, Marlborough & Andover had planned to tunnel under the hill on which Swindon's Old Town stands but the money ran out and the railway ran into Swindon Town railway station, off Devizes Road in the Old Town, skirting the new town to the west, intersecting with the GWR at Rushey Platt and heading north for Cirencester, Cheltenham and the LMS, whose 'Midland Red' livery the M&SWJR adopted.

During the second half of the 19th century, Swindon New Town grew around the main line between London and Bristol. In 1900, the original market town, Old Swindon, merged with its new neighbour at the bottom of the hill to become a single town.

On 1 July 1923, the GWR took over the largely single-track M&SWJR and the line northwards from Swindon Town was diverted to Swindon Junction station, leaving the Town station with only the line south to Andover and Salisbury. The last passenger trains on what had been the SM&A ran on 10 September 1961, 80 years after the railway's first stretch opened.

During the first half of the 20th century, the railway works was the town's largest employer and one of the biggest in the country, employing more than 14,500. Alfred Williams (1877–1930) wrote about his life as a hammerman at the works.

The works' decline started in 1960, when it rolled out Evening Star, the last steam locomotive to be built in the UK. The works lost its locomotive-building role and took on rolling stock maintenance for British Rail. In the late 1970s, much of the works closed, and the rest followed in 1986.

The community centre in the railway village was originally the barracks accommodation for railway employees of the GWR. The building became the Railway Museum in the 1960s, until the opening of 'STEAM – Museum of the Great Western Railway' in the 2000s.

Modern period

The Second World War saw an influx of new industries as part of the war effort; Vickers-Armstrong making aircraft at Stratton, and Plessey at Cheney Manor producing electrical components. By 1960, Plessey had become Swindon's biggest employer, with a predominantly female workforce.

David Murray John, Swindon's town clerk from 1938 to 1974, is seen as a pioneering figure in Swindon's post-war regeneration: his last act before retirement was to sign the contract for Swindon's tallest building, which is now named after him. Murray John's successor was David Maxwell Kent, appointed by the Swindon/Highworth Joint Committee in 1973: he had worked closely with Murray John and continued similar policies for a further twenty years. The Greater London Council withdrew from the Town Development Agreement, and the local council continued the development on its own.

There was the problem of the Western Development and of Lydiard Park being in the new North Wiltshire district, but this was resolved by a boundary change to take in part of North Wiltshire. Another factor limiting local decision-making was the continuing role of Wiltshire County Council in the administration of Swindon. Together with like-minded councils, a campaign was launched to bring an updated form of county borough status to Swindon. This was successful in 1997 with the formation of Swindon Borough Council, covering the areas of the former Thamesdown and the former Highworth Rural District Council.

In February 2008, The Times named Swindon as one of "The 20 best places to buy a property in Britain". Only Warrington had a lower ratio of house prices to household income in 2007, with the average household income in Swindon among the highest in the country.

In October 2008, Swindon Council made a controversial move to ban fixed point speed cameras. The move was branded as reckless by some, but by November 2008 Portsmouth, Walsall, and Birmingham councils were also considering the move.

In 2001, construction began on Priory Vale, the third and final instalment in Swindon's 'Northern Expansion' project, which began with Abbey Meads and continued at St Andrew's Ridge. In 2002, the New Swindon Company was formed with the remit of regenerating the town centre, to improve Swindon's regional status. The main areas targeted were Union Square, The Promenade, The Hub, Swindon Central, North Star Village, The Campus, and the Public Realm.

In August 2019, a secondary school in the town was at the centre of a 'county lines' drug supply investigation by Wiltshire Police, with 40 pupils suspected of being involved in the supply of cannabis and cocaine, and girls as young as 14 being coerced into sexual activity in exchange for drugs.

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