A Swindon Retrospect 1855-1930

A Swindon Retrospect 1855-1930 by Frederick Large, published by Red Brick Publishing in 1984, is a wonderfully specific slice of local history devoted to a town that spent the nineteenth century being transformed from somewhere comparatively modest into one of the great industrial railway centres of Britain.

Swindon is not always treated with the breathless romanticism reserved for Oxford, Bath or York.

This is unfair.

Few places can claim to have been reshaped so dramatically by steam, engineering, workshops and the arrival of a workforce large enough to require streets, schools, pubs, chapels, shops and the occasional committee to complain about all of them.

The period covered here, 1855 to 1930, catches Swindon in the middle of that extraordinary expansion.

The Great Western Railway looms large over the story, because for decades the railway works did rather more than provide employment.

They shaped the town.

They shaped its population.

They shaped its streets.

And they ensured that an enormous number of local conversations probably began with some variation of “what shift are you on?”

Frederick Large looks back at Swindon as it developed through the later Victorian and Edwardian periods and into the early twentieth century, recording the buildings, people, institutions, businesses and everyday changes that turned the town into something recognisably modern.

This is the kind of local history book that becomes more interesting with age.

At the time of publication in 1984, many readers would have known the places described.

Some may even have remembered the people or the streets.

Now, decades later, the book has become another layer of history itself.

That is one of the pleasures of local retrospectives.

They start by looking backwards.

Then time passes.

Eventually they become part of the thing they were looking back at.

The title may sound modest, but the subject is anything but.

Between 1855 and 1930 Britain went through enormous social and technological change, and Swindon experienced much of it in concentrated form.

Railways expanded.

Industry grew.

Public services developed.

Housing spread.

Motor traffic arrived.

And the town had to keep adapting while everyone pretended this was all completely normal.

Local history is often where national history becomes understandable.

It is easy to talk about industrialisation in the abstract.

It is much more revealing to see what it meant in one town: which roads appeared, which institutions opened, where people worked, what was demolished, what survived and how the place physically changed around them.

Swindon is particularly good material for this because its industrial identity was so strong.

The railway works created not only jobs but culture, routine and civic identity.

Generations of families were tied to the railway.

The works became part factory, part institution and part gravitational field.

Even people who had nothing to do with the railway were living in a town whose shape had been influenced by it.

There is also a pleasing irony in a book published in 1984 looking back nostalgically at a period when people themselves were probably complaining that everything was changing too quickly.

History is full of this.

One generation says the town is being ruined.

The next generation wishes somebody had preserved more of it.

Then somebody publishes a book.

For readers with family connections to Swindon, A Swindon Retrospect 1855-1930 has obvious appeal.

It is also a useful book for railway enthusiasts, local historians, social historians and anyone interested in the growth of industrial towns.

And if you simply enjoy old photographs, vanished streets and the peculiar satisfaction of discovering what occupied a site before it became a roundabout, you are very much the target audience.

Condition: Good. A sound used copy with normal signs of age and handling. Published in 1984, it has now been around long enough to qualify as a minor piece of Swindon history in its own right.

ISBN: 0950718262.

A detailed and evocative look back at Swindon between 1855 and 1930, covering the years when steam, industry and urban growth transformed the town and nobody had yet invented the phrase “regeneration scheme”.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — preserving local history long after somebody has redeveloped the site.

Keep browsing: See more History books Other books by Frederick Large