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!
Wheel sculptures Old Town Cycle path. There are five wheels, from the Old Town direction towards the railway and Wootton Bassett Road they are Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Conceive.
Each wheel has two parts, a small wheel showing the Element, and a large wheel with a short piece of poetry. In addition, there is a length of wood crossing the path between each of the wheel pairs. Each of these lengths of wood has two words written on them.
Leaving behind White Horse Pacified to move onto WSSW: Part 4 – Hey Diddle Diddle. This took Kim and I around some bits of what I term ‘proper’ places. By that I mean houses and areas that have clearly been here much longer than all this ‘new’ (70s, 80s 90s) development of Swindon.
Whenever I see this cow sculpture it makes me smile and think of one of my favourite Ogden Nash poems:
‘Two cows, mildly mooing:
No bull; nothing doing’
Ken White – Swindon’s Mural Man. Known and loved by many Swindonians for the murals that once were scattered across the town. Only one now remains, and that’s his first one, the Golden Lion Bridge mural.
Welcome to part 3 in a series (I’m not sure how many the series will consist of cos I’m making it up as I go along) about the West Swindon sculpture walk – in which we encounter White Horse Pacified.
Tree with tiles round - West Swindon 28th September 2014: Old post updated Kiln Park It's interesting how, since starting this blog, I've begun noticing things more. Apropos the subject of this post it's less a case of noticing and more a case of paying some actual...
