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A town built on heritage
Swindon is a town built on its industrial heritage
Swindon is a town steeped in heritage but that doesn’t mean it’s stuck in the past.
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At its peak early in the 20th century, Swindon’s Great Western Railway (GWR) works occupied an area of 326 acres and employed some 14,000 staff, making it one of the largest industrial sites in the world. The full story of that revered age can be seen at the award-winning STEAM Museum.
World War II was to prove a watershed both for the GWR and Swindon. The former lost its separate identity with the nationalization of the railways in 1948, while the latter was designated an overspill town for London under the provisions of the 1951 Town Development Act.
The railway works would eventually close in 1986, but the legacy of GWR engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Daniel Gooch is still evident in the fabric of the town, not least at the South West’s most popular shopping village, the Designer Outlet, housed in atmospheric GWR buildings.
For connoisseurs of superb architecture and heritage buffs the best place to start a visit to Swindon is the town’s Grade II listed Railway Village, a lovingly preserved grid of streets located next to the town’s railway station and a unique example of a Victorian development for an industrial workforce.
Swindon absorbed its working class Londoners in the 1950s and 1960s and has continued to welcome newcomers from far and wide. It now boasts a population of 220,000 speaking more than 100 languages. That cosmopolitan flavor is there for all to see in a huge array of international eateries – Indian, Greek, Himalayan, Chinese, Thai, Italian, Spanish, Portugese and Brazilian, just for starters.
Meanwhile, the town is home to a huge range of renowned names - Nationwide Building Society, National Trust, English Heritage, Zurich Insurance, Intel, NPower and WH Smith among them. And in a move that Brunel himself would have approved of, the old GWR Carriage Works is now a thriving tech hub for the latest generation of forward thinking Swindonians.
