The Magic Roundabout: a guide book entryI wrote this guide book entry in the final year of my English/Eng Lang studies at UWE. The piece formed part of a travel writing module.For my coursework portfolio I wrote, amongst other things, some stuff about Swindon:* a...
A weekend visit to the Swindon designer outlet centre or whatever it is we are calling it, has prompted me to write a view lines about it. Cos I think it’s really rather cool – and I don’t only mean for the shopping.
John Richard Jefferies (1848-1887): is best known for his prolific and sensitive writing on natural history, rural life and agriculture in late Victorian England.
I’ve always rather liked the Spectrum building or the Renault building as it tends to be referred to, even though the car company moved out of it some years ago.
Well dear readers, here we are with the last in my series of 10 things I think are worth celebrating about Swindon.
It’s not by any means a definitive list. Merely 10 things that have made an impression on me. Any one of you out there could make a completely different and equally valid list. The point being, and as Brian so eruditely points out in his post, Swindon and Swindonians – and after 20 years here I’d like to count myself as one because Swindon is definitely home to me now – has so very, very much to be proud of.
It’s something of a cheat putting David Bent artist into this list of ten things to celebrate about Swindon. Not because he doesn’t warrant inclusion – good gracious me no. Nothing could be further from the truth. No, no. What I mean by it being a bit of sleight of hand is that, when I set up this blog and created the aforementioned celebratory list a few years ago now, David wasn’t on it. Why not? Well because I didn’t know him and hadn’t heard of him back then.
August 2013
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a busy university student needs guest bloggers to keep the blogging ball rolling. So I’m super grateful to Frances Bevan for sending me these words about some of Swindon’s old farmhouses.
Whilst my knowledge of Swindon, is at best, superficial – though my enthusiasm for the town is anything but – the same cannot be said of Frances.
This post, as you can tell, is a very early post on this blog, featuring the Swindon Museum of Computing. I really need to have a word with my chum Simon Webb, get a guided tour, and redo it. But this will give you the idea.
At last! I’ve managed to get my copy of The Swindon Book by Mark Child, from the tourist information desk at the central library. As the back cover says, the book is:
At the end of part 5 of this series, Kim and I had reached Nexus at Freshbrook, at which point we called it a day as we were ready for dinner. We’d been out for hours and had a great time but had still only visited 5 out of the 7 sculptures itemised on the tour.
A Flavour of Historic Highworth – the Highworth Hotel, the Ice House and more.
In part 4 of this series my companion and myself visited ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ which is in The Prinnels, West Swindon. Now we move onto WSSW Part 5: Nexus at Freshbrook.
I explained about spending the last twenty years seeing but not really ‘noticing’ that sculpture from the bus and never realising the significance of it – which is a bit shameful when you think of it. Well I’m sorry to say that my chagrin doesn’t end there. Oh dear me no! The situation with this next one is very similar I’m sorry to say. Even as my friend and I were reading the ‘bumph’ about this sculpture I still wasn’t making the connection – and ‘connection’ is actually very apposite indeed. It was only as we approached Freshbrook that I realized what we were going to. Doh!
