Borough of Swindon: Railway Town Reinvented at the M4 Corridor
Swindon owes its modern existence to the Great Western Railway. In 1843, Isambard Kingdom Brunel chose the town as the site for the GWR locomotive works, and for over a century the works employed the majority of the population. The Railway Village — terraced housing built for the workers in the 1840s and 1850s — still stands, now Grade II listed, a planned settlement that predated the garden city movement by half a century. STEAM, the museum of the Great Western Railway, occupies part of the old works site.
The railway works closed in 1986, but Swindon pivoted. Its position on the M4 between Bristol and London attracted technology and financial services companies. Honda opened a car manufacturing plant at South Marston in 1985, which produced Civics and Jazz models for the European market until its closure in 2021 — a significant economic blow. Intel, Nationwide Building Society (headquartered in Swindon), and Zurich Insurance all established major operations in the borough.
Swindon is famous for two other things, both involving circles. The Magic Roundabout — a junction of five mini-roundabouts arranged around a central roundabout, with traffic flowing in both directions — baffles newcomers but works with surprising efficiency. And the nearby Avebury stone circle, actually in Wiltshire Council's territory but closely associated with the Swindon area, is older and arguably more impressive than Stonehenge. The borough population is around 235,000.
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Swindon owes its modern existence to the Great Western Railway. In 1843, Isambard Kingdom Brunel chose the town as the site for the GWR locomotive works, and for over a century the works employed the majority of the population. The Railway Village — terraced housing built for the workers in the 1840s and 1850s — still stands, now Grade II listed, a planned settlement that predated the garden city movement by half a century. STEAM, the museum of the Great Western Railway, occupies part of the old works site.
The railway works closed in 1986, but Swindon pivoted. Its position on the M4 between Bristol and London attracted technology and financial services companies. Honda opened a car manufacturing plant at South Marston in 1985, which produced Civics and Jazz models for the European market until its closure in 2021 — a significant economic blow. Intel, Nationwide Building Society (headquartered in Swindon), and Zurich Insurance all established major operations in the borough.
Swindon is famous for two other things, both involving circles. The Magic Roundabout — a junction of five mini-roundabouts arranged around a central roundabout, with traffic flowing in both directions — baffles newcomers but works with surprising efficiency. And the nearby Avebury stone circle, actually in Wiltshire Council's territory but closely associated with the Swindon area, is older and arguably more impressive than Stonehenge. The borough population is around 235,000.
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