Swindon ( ) is a large town
and unitary borough authority in the ceremonial county of Wiltshire
in south west
England. It is midway between Bristol
, west, and
Reading
, east. London is east.
Swindon railway
station
is on the line from London, Paddington
to Bristol. Swindon Borough Council, is a
unitary authority independent of
Wiltshire Council since 1997. Residents of
Swindon are known as
Swindonians.
Swindon's
motto is
"Salubritas et
Industria" (health and industry).
Swindon was named an Expanded Town under the Town Development Act
1952 and this led to a major increase in its population.
In the
2001 census the population of the Swindon urban area was 155,432,
while around 184,000 lived in the borough, which includes the large villages
of Highworth
and Wroughton
.
History
Etymology
The original
Saxon settlement of
Swindon sat in a defensible position atop a limestone hill. It is
referred to in the
Domesday Book as
Suindune, believed to be derived from the
Anglo-Saxon words
swine and
dun meaning 'pig hill', or possibly 'Sweyn's hill', where
Sweyn would be the local landlord.
Industrial Revolution
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.
It started with the
construction of the Wilts and Berks Canal
in 1810 and the North Wilts Canal
in 1819. The canals brought trade to the
area, and Swindon's population started to grow.
Railway town
In 1840,
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
chose Swindon as the site for the railway works
he planned for the Great Western Railway.
Eastwards
towards London the line was gently graded, while westwards there
was a steep descent towards Bath
.
Swindon
was the junction for the proposed line to Gloucester
.
Swindon
Junction
station
opened in 1842 and until 1895 every train stopped
for at least 10 minutes to change locomotives. As a result,
the station hosted the first recorded railway refreshment rooms.
There were three
storeys to the station in
1842, with the refreshment rooms on the ground floor, the upper
floors housing the station hotel and lounge. That building was
demolished in 1972, and replaced by an office building with a
single-
storey modern station under it.
The town's railway works were completed in 1842. The
GWR built a small railway 'village' to
house some of its workers. People still live in those houses and
several of the buildings that made up the railway works remain,
although many are vacant.
The Steam Railway Museum
now occupies 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,
Turkish
baths and swimming pools – was almost opposite.
From 1871,
GWR workers had a
small amount deducted from their weekly pay and put into a
healthcare fund – its doctors could prescribe them or their family
members free 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 2000 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 looking 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
path 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. Some claim that
GWR Chief Engineer Daniel Gooch had
got the railway to fund the Institute.
It had the UK's first lending library, and a range of improving
lectures, access to a theatre and a range of activiies from
ambulance classes to
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 that ran a retail
business from a stall in the market at the Institute. The Institute
also nurtured pioneering trades 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
GWR Medical Society Fund, which the
Institute had played a role in establishing and funding.
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
. The
Old Town, the original market town, merged with its newer neighbour
at the bottom of the hill to become a single
Swindon.
20th century

Swindon in 1933
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 workers. The works' decline started in
1960, when it rolled out
Evening
Star, the last steam engine to be built in the UK The
works lost its loco 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.
21st century
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 are
Union Square, The Promenade, The Hub, Swindon Central, North Star
Village, The Campus and the Public Realm.
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 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 considering the move.
Geography and climate
The town has an area of approximately 40
km² (25.33
mi²).
Swindon has a
temperate climate, with
roughly equal length winters and summers. The landscape is
dominated by the chalk hills of the Wiltshire Downs to the south
and east.
- Nearby towns and cities: Chippenham
, Wootton
Bassett
, Cirencester
, Cricklade
, Highworth
, Marlborough
, Malmesbury
, Calne
- Nearby villages: Aldbourne
, Blunsdon
, Chiseldon
, Hook
, Lambourn
, Liddington
, Lydiard
Millicent, Purton
, Ramsbury
, South
Marston
, Wanborough
, Wroughton
- Nearby places of interest: Avebury
, Barbury
Castle
, Crofton Pumping Station
, Silbury
Hill
, Stonehenge
, Uffington White Horse
- Sites of Special Scientific
Interest in Swindon include - Coate Water
, Great Quarry
, Haydon
Meadow
, Okus
Quarry
, Old Town Railway Cutting
and Lydiard Country
Park
Government

A Swindon-built locomotive (Hagley
Hall) on display in the eating area of the McArthur Glen Designer
Outlet, Swindon.
The local council was created in 1974 as the Borough of Thamesdown,
out of Swindon Borough and Highworth Rural Councils. It was not
initially called Swindon, because the borough covers a larger area
than the town and encompasses villages and land. It was eventually
renamed to Borough of Swindon in 1997, however. The borough became
a
unitary authority on 1 April
1998, following a review by
Local Government
Commission for England. The town is therefore no longer under
the auspices of Wiltshire Council.
The borough consists of parished and non-parished areas.
Parished
areas inlcude Bishopstone and Hinton Parva, Blunsdon St
Andrew
, Castle
Eaton
, Chiseldon
, Covingham, Hannington, Haydon Wick
, Highworth
, Inglesham, Liddington
, South
Marston
, Stanton Fitzwarren, Stratton St
Margaret
, Wanborough, Wroughton
.
The executive comprises a leader and a cabinet made up from the
Conservative Group. The makeup of the council is
Conservative 43 councillors,
Labour 12,
Liberal Democrat 3 and 1 (previously
Labour) independent.
Swindon
is represented in the national parliament
by two MPs. Anne
Snelgrove (Labour) was elected for the South Swindon
seat in 2005, and Michael
Wills, also Labour, has represented North Swindon
since 1997. Prior to 1997, there was a
single seat for Swindon, although much of what is now in Swindon
was then in the Devizes seat.
Demographics
The 2001 census showes there were 180,061 people and 75,154
occupied houses in the Swindon Unitary Authority. The average
household size was 2.38 people. The population density was 780/km²
(2020.19/mi²). 20.96% of the population were 0–15 years old, 72.80%
16-74, and the remaining 6.24% were 75 years old or over. For every
100 females there were 98.97 males. Approximately 300,000 people
live within 20 minutes of Swindon town centre.
The ethnic make-up of the town was 95.2% white, 1.3% Indian, and
3.5% other. 92.4% were born in the UK, 2.7% in the EU, and 4.9%
elsewhere.
It is forecast that there will be a 70,000 (38.9%) increase in
Swindon's population by 2026 from the current 180,000, to 250,000.
The size of the population and urban area has raised the
possibility of city status.
Swindon is considered to be a microcosm of the whole United Kingdom
in its demography. It has thus been used for market research
purposes and trials of new products and services incliding the
ill-fated
Mondex electronic money.
Religious communities include
Church
of England,
Catholic,
Mormon, and one of the largest
Sikh temples in the UK. More people have joined the
Hare Krishna movement in Swindon than
in any other English town .
In May 2007 65.3% of households in Swindon had
broadband Internet access, the
highest in the UK, up 5.5% from June 2006.
A 2007
report by Endsleigh Insurance
says it was the second safest place to live in the UK, second only
to Guildford
in Surrey
.
This was based on the number of insurance claims made and
burglaries and accidents reported. Endsleigh said: "Swindon is a
great example of where local authorities, working hand in hand with
the community, have played a key role in bringing down crime"
Polish community
After the end of World War II, Polish refugees were temporarily
housed in barracks at Fairford
RAF
base about 25 km (15 miles) north. Around 1950 some settled in
Scotland and others in Swindon rather than stay in the barracks or
hostels they were offered.
The 2001 UK Census found that most of the Polish-born people had
stayed or returned after serving with British forces during World
War II. Swindon and Nottingham were parts of this settlement. Data
from that census showed that 566 Swindonians were Poland-born.
Notes to those data read: ‘The Polish Resettlement Act of 1947,
which was designed to provide help and support to people who wished
to settle here, covered about 190,000 people...at the time Britain
did not recognise many of the professional [qualifications] gained
overseas...[but] many did find work after the war; some went down
the mines, some worked on the land or in steel works. Housing was
more of a problem and many Poles were forced to live in barracks
previously used for
POW...The first
generation took pains to ensure that their children grew up with a
strong sense of Polish identity.’
In 2004,
NHS planners
devising services for senior citizens estimated that 5 percent of
Swindon's population were not ‘ethnically British’ and most of
those were culturally Polish.
The town's Polish ex-servicemen's club, which had run a football
team for 40 years, closed in 2007. Barman Jerzy Trojan blamed the
decline of both club and team on the children and grandchildren of
the original refugees losing their Polish identity.
Business
Major employers include the
Honda car
production plant at an old Vickers factory site on the former World
War II RAF base of South Marston;
BMW/
Mini formerly Pressed Steel Fisher in Stratton; mobile
phone company
Motorola;
Dolby Labs; and retailer
W H
Smith's distribution centre and headquarters.
The computer company
Intel
has its European head office on the south side of
the town. Insurance and financial services companies such as
Nationwide Building
Society and
Zurich
Financial Services, the energy company RWE which includes the
well known retail brand
npower, the fuel
card and fleet management company
Arval, pharmaceutical companies such as
Canada's
Patheon and the United States-based
Cardinal Health have their UK
divisions headquartered in the town. Swindon also has the
registered Head Office of the
National Trust
Other employers include several of the national
Research Councils, the
British Computer Society,
Alcatel-Lucent, eCommerce provider
Shopatron, divisions of
Tyco International, consumer goods
supplier
Reckitt Benckiser and a
branch of
Becton Dickinson.
Transport
At the junction of two Roman roads, the town has developed over the
centuries, with the assistance of the
GWR and the
canals, into a transport hub. It has two junctions (15
and 16) onto the
M4 motorway and is on
the ex-GWR main line to London.
Swindon bus operators are Thamesdown and Stagecoach.
The local council acknowledges the need for more car parking as
part of its vision for 2010.
Swindon is one of the locations for an innovative scheme called
Car share.
It was set up as a joint venture between
Wiltshire County Council and a
private organization which now has over 300,000 members registered.
Despite the name, however, it is a
carpool
or ride-sharing rather than a
car share
scheme, seeking to link people willing to share transport.
Roundabouts
town is notable for its
roundabouts and
there is a calendar featuring a different roundabout each month.
The
best-known is the 'Magic Roundabout
'. This is not one roundabout but five,
on at the junction of five roads including Drove Road, Queens Drive
and Fleming Way.
It is built on the site of Swindon wharf on
the abandoned Wilts & Berks Canal
, near the County Ground
. The official name used to be County
Islands, although it was colloquially known as the Magic Roundabout
and the name was changed in the late 1990s to match its nickname.
The roundabout is the subject of the song
English
Roundabout from the album
English Settlement by local band
XTC.
Tourism and recreation
Events
- Swindon was chosen to be the host of Radio 1's Big Weekend in 2009. The
event was held in Lydiard Park over the
weekend of 9 and 10 May 2009.
- The town has a live music scene, venues such as The Beehive,
Riffs Bar,
The 12
Bar and The Victoria attract local acts as well as touring
national acts and host Swindon's annual music festival the Swindon
Shuffle.. The Oasis Leisure Centre
and the County Ground
are also used for some of the more major
events.
- The Arts Centre, located in Old Town, is a 212 seater
theatre which features music, professional and amateur theatre,
nationally-recognised comedians, films, children's events, and
one-man shows.
- The Wyvern Theatre features events in film, comedy, and
music.
- Swindon hosts festivals such as the Swindon Festival of Literature and the annual Swindon
Mela (an all-day celebration of South Indian arts and culture) in
the Town Gardens - an event which attracts up to 10,000 visitors
each year.[9497]
Shopping
- The
Brunel Centre and the Parade are shopping areas in the town centre,
built along the line of the filled-in Wilts and
Berks Canal
(where a canal milepost can still be
seen).
- Swindon Tented Market located in the Town Centre, close to the
Brunel Centre, was built in 1994. It is due to reopen on Friday
23rd October 2009, having been closed for several years. Property
investment firm Panther Securities plc, purchased the property,
refurbished it and have announced its opening, to offer 34
independent traders offering the public value and variety.
- Retail parks include Greenbridge, West Swindon Shopping Centre,
Stratton and the Orbital Shopping Park.
- McArthur Glen Designer Outlet
is an indoor shopping mall for reduced price
goods (mainly clothing), using the buildings of the disused railway
engine works. The outlet is adjacent to the Steam
Museum
.
- Craft shops within Studley Grange Craft Village, inside Blooms
Garden Centre, just off junction 16 of the M4 motorway.
- Small specialist shops within BSS House in Cheney Manor
Industrial Park and Basepoint Business Centre.
Green spaces
- Public parks include Lydiard Country Park, Stanton Park,
Barbury Castle, Queens Park
, Town Gardens and Coate
Water
.
- Shaw Community Forest is being developed on the site of a
former landfill site in West Swindon.
Other
Media
Print
Swindon has a daily
newspaper, the
Swindon Advertiser, with
daily sales of about 21,000.
Other newspapers covering the area include
Bristol
's daily
Western Daily Press and
the Swindon Advertisers weekly, the Gazette and Herald. It's
All About a free magazine distributed in Swindon
The
Wiltshire Ocelot (a free listings magazine),
Swindon
Star,
Hungry Monkeys (a comic),
Stratton
Outlook,
Frequency (an arts and cultural magazine),
The Great Swindon Magazine, the
Swindon Business
News and
The Swindon Link (for information on the
goings on in Swindon).
Radio
Local radio stations include
Heart
Wiltshire and
Brunel FM in the
commercial sector, with
BBC Radio
Swindon as a publicly funded alternative. An
AM station,
Classic Gold 936/1161 only includes
local programming in the late afternoon. A new community station
was launched in March 2008,
Swindon
105.5, which is one of the only stations in Swindon to
broadcast local content 24/7. On the 9 and 10 May, Swindon held
Radio 1's Big Weekend.
Television
Between 1973 and June 2000 Swindon had its own cable television
channel. It was called
Swindon
Viewpoint, a community television project run mainly by
enthusiasts from the basement of a
Radio
Rentals branch on Victoria Road. It was followed by the more
commercial
Swindon's Local Channel,
which included pay-per-view films. NTL (later
Virgin Media) took over the channel's parent
company, ComTel, and closed the station.
Regional news programmes covering Swindon include
Thames Valley Tonight replaced by
"
Meridian Tonight" for the second
time in Feb 2009 and
The West
Tonight from regional
ITV1 stations
and
South Today and
Points West from
BBC One's regional variants.
The website dedicated to Swindon,
SwindonWeb.com,
launched a broadband TV channel, SwindonWebTV, in November
2007.
New media
The first website dedicated to the town,
SwindonWeb.com,
was set up in July 1997. In 2001, it won the BBC Radio 2 'Website
of the Day' award being described as 'a truly exceptional
resource'.
Swindon has two
web forum communities
producing
New Media for the inhabitants of
the Borough:
Talkswindon.org and
Swindontalk.org
Talkswindon is the larger of the two web
communities with over 400 members. Community members attend local
events and council meetings before publishing their experiences on
the Talkswindon forum. These
on-line reports
often lead to lengthy debates. Topics include local politics,
culture and the environment.
In contrast to its larger twin, the
Swindontalk
forum is more relaxed and focuses more on social activities and
local news. The Talkswindon and Swindontalk forums are wholly owned
and maintained by their members, membership and use of both forums
is free to the public.
SwindonMusic.co.uk is the largest online discussion
board regarding local music with over a thousand members. The
website acts as a guide to the local music scene with events
listings, band profiles and venue information. The website was
instrumental in the creation of the now well-established charity
festival Swindon Shuffle, as well as being the birthplace for the
idea for the Radio One Big Weekend.
Film and television location
- Swindon was used as a backdrop to a 1994 commercial for
Benylin cough medicine. The advert featured
a shot of Britain and then zoomed in and cut to aerial views of
Swindon, stopping at a bathroom window at 29 Falconscroft,
Covingham.
- The long-running television series Casualty has used Swindon locations for
two of its episodes. The Oasis Leisure Centre featured in the
1994 episode "Only The Lonely", and Wroughton
Airfield was used to recreate a huge motorway crash
in the 1997 episode "The Golden Hour".
Education
Swindon has 53 primary schools, 11 secondary schools and two
purpose built sixth-form colleges. Two secondary schools also have
an in-house sixth-form.
Further education
New College and Swindon
College
cater for the town's further education and higher education requirements, mainly for
16-21 year olds. Swindon College is one of the largest FE-HE
colleges in southwestern England, situated at a purpose-built
campus in North Star, Swindon.
University-level education
The
University
of Bath
in Swindon was established in 2000, with its
Oakfield Campus in Walcot, east Swindon, although the campus will
soon close.
Oxford
Brookes University
's Ferndale site is based in Swindon, housing its
School of Health and Social Care since 1999.
Swindon
is the UK's largest centre of population without its own university
(by comparison, there are two universities in nearby Bath
, which is
half Swindon's size). In March 2008 a proposal was put
forward by the MP for Swindon South, Anne Snelgrove, for a
university-level institution to be established in the town within a
decade, culminating in a future 'University of Swindon'. In October
2008, plans were announced for a possible University of Swindon
campus to be built in east Swindon to the south of the town's Great
Western Hospital, close to the M4-A419 interchange.
Museums and cultural institutions
Sports
Football
Swindon Town F.C., play in League One (third tier) at the County
Ground
near Swindon Town centre. They have been
Football League members since
joining the then new
Third Division (southern
section) in
1920, and won promotion to the
Second Division for
the first time in
1963.
They won their only
major trophy to date, the Football
League Cup, in 1969, beating Arsenal 3-1 at Wembley Stadium
. They won promotion to the
First Division in
1990, but stayed in the Second Division due to
financial irregularities, only to reach the top flight (by then the
Premier League) three years later.
Their spell in the top flight lasted just one season, and then came
a second successive relegation. A brief spite saw them promoted at
the first attempt as champions of the new Division Two, but they
were relegated again four years later and in
2006 fell back into the fourth tier for the first time
since
1986, although promotion was gained at
the first attempt. Notable former players of the club include
John Trollope,
Don Rogers,
John
Moncur,
Fraser Digby,
Steve White,
Duncan
Shearer,
Paul Bodin,
Alan McLoughlin,
Paul Rideout,
Mike
Summerbee,
Shaun Taylor and
Phil King. Notable former managers include
Lou Macari,
Ossie Ardiles,
Glenn
Hoddle,
John Gorman,
Steve McMahon,
Jimmy
Quinn (a former player of the club),
Colin Todd,
Andy King,
Dennis Wise and
Paul Sturrock.
The town
also has two non league clubs: Swindon Supermarine F.C.
, playing in Southern League Premier Division,
and Highworth
Town F.C.
, based in Highworth
and playing in the Hellenic League
Motor sports
- Swindon Robins - a speedway team
competing in the Elite League. The team has operated at the Abbey
Stadium, Blunsdon since the mid-1949. There are proposals to
redevelop the stadium. Speedway operated at a track in the Gorse
Hill area of Swindon in the early days of the late 1920s and early
1930s.
- Foxhill motocross circuit
is 6 miles south east of the town and has
staged Grand Prix events.
Other sports
Twin towns
Swindon is
twinned with:
In popular culture
- Robert Goddard's Into the Blue, Out of the
Sun and most recently "Never Go Back" feature the central
character of Harry Barnett from Swindon, and all three novels start
in the town. The TV detective series A Touch of Frost starring
David Jason is often set in or around
Swindon (called "Denton" in the series) and early episodes feature
briefings of the detective team in front of maps of the Swindon
area.
- The British television comedy series
The Office
contains references to Swindon. In the programme Swindon was home to part of
Wernham-Hogg's Slough
office
after downsizing.
- The town was referred to in a 1998 episode of The Comic Strip titled "Four Men in a Car"
in which Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmundson et al. attempt to get to
Swindon for a sales conference. and featured Mayall's frequent
lament "I just want to get to Swindon".
- The British television series Red
Dwarf makes a reference to the town in series seven, in
the episode Epideme. The character Dave Lister dies and is brought back from the
dead. Upon being asked what death was like, he replies "Have you
ever been to Swindon?"
- The father of The Nice Family (a caricature of a strictly
disciplined, dull family) in Channel 4's "Absolutely" exclaims "By Swindon,
this is an inspiring tale!" during a particularly boring
presentation by a travelling salesman.
- Comedian Eddie Izzard uses Swindon
as the base of a fictitious 1960s British moon landing attempt that
uses a series of ladders. In his live recording Dress to Kill, the San
Francisco-based audience fails to recognise the reference and he
makes light of this:
James Bond
In music
- The rock band XTC,
formed in 1977, are from Swindon, as are members of the related act
Shriekback. XTC's
co-founder guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and graphic artist
Andy Partridge still lives in the
town.
- Liam Gallagher, frontman of the
rock band Oasis chose the name of the
band after seeing Swindon's Oasis swimming pool and leisure centre
on a poster for Inspiral Carpets,
whilst his brother Noel Gallagher
worked as a roadie for a band.
- Supertramp keyboard player and singer
Rick Davies comes from Swindon. The
sleeve art for Breakfast in
America shows the band's members in an American diner
reading their hometowns' newspapers, Davies is reading Swindon's
Evening Advertiser (since renamed as the Swindon Advertiser).
- Moody Blues' vocalist, lead
guitarist and songwriter Justin
Hayward is from Swindon. He wrote their biggest hit
Nights in White
Satin.
- Electronic music outfit Meat
Beat Manifesto were formed in Swindon in 1987.
- 1970s novelty act The Barron
Knights released The Swindon Cowboy as the B-side of
their 1980 single Never Mind the Presents. Written after
the band played a gig in town, it gently mocks the Swindon
accent.
- Actress and singer Billie Piper was
born in Swindon in 1982.
- Alex Yeoman, better known as the bass player from Captain (or as his current alter-ego, the
YouTube sensation 'Antan Debt'), is from
Swindon.
See also
References
- From Cradle to Grave, SwindonWeb.Retrieved on
[2007-07-23].
- ‘’Background’’ – New Mechanics Institution
Preservation Society. Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
- 1850 – New Mechanics Institution
Preservation Trust, Swindon. Retrieved on 23 July 2007.
- Daniel Gooch - The Father of Swindon Works,
SwindonWeb. Retrieved on 23 July 2007.
- Background – New Mechanics Institution
Preservation Trust, Swindon.Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
- This is Our Heritage - 1996 lecture by Swindon
labour movement historian Trevor Cockbill. Retrieved on
2007-07-23.
- Background – New Mechanics Institution
Preservation Society.Retrieved 2007-07-23.
- Swindon's Other Railway - the Swindon,
Marlborough & Andover Railway. Retrieved on
2007-07-23.
- The Midland & South Western Junction
Railway, Railspot Reloaded.Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
- GWR Museum picture gallery.Retrieved
on 2007-07-23
- Evening Star - Steam Locomotive, BBC, 29 November
2006.Retrieved on 2007-07-21.
- New
Swindon - Welcome to New Swindon
- The 20 best places to buy a property in Britain -
Times Online
- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4999970.ece
More councils expected to ban speed cameras - Times Online
- http://www.bigredl.co.uk/Swindonbansspeedcameras.htm
-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/23/localgovernment-motoring
- Swindon and Milton Keynes top the UK broadband
league – Computer Weekly, London, 23 May
2007.Accessed:2007-08-21.
- Community celebrates its golden
anniversary, Swindon Advertiser, 31 May 2000.Retrieved on
2007-07-23.
- Polish club closes doors for last time –
Swindon Advertiser, 1 April 2007. Retrieved on 2007-07-24
- Born Abroad, BBC News.Retrieved on
2007-07-23.
- – Polish Community Focus Multicultural
Matters.Retrieved on 2007-07-23
- Modernising Services for Older People in
Swindon– Avon & Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS
Trust, Swindon Primary Care Trust and Swindon Borough
Council.Retrieved on 2007-07-24.
- Polish club closes doors for last time –
Swindon Advertiser, 1 April 2007. Retrieved on 2007-27-24.
- Aerial view from Google maps
- http://www.itsallabout.org.uk
- Swindon Cable - Swindon View Point - The Local
Channel, Swindoncable.co.uk. Retrieved on 2007-07-21.
- http://www.swindonmusic.co.uk/forum/view/1240/
Further reading
- Swindon, Mark Child, Breedon Books, 2002, hardcover,
159 pages, ISBN 1-85983-322-5
- Francis Frith's Swindon Living Memories (Photographic
Memories S.), Francis Frith and Brian Bridgeman, The Frith
Book Company Ltd, 2003, Paperback, 96 pages, ISBN
1-85937-656-8
External links