A Brief History of Swindon. From the swindon canal to its railway period, i take a walk round old town and talk about Swindon's past.

Between 1841 and 1842, Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Swindon Works was built for the repair and maintenance of locomotives on the Great Western Railway (GWR). The GWR built a small railway village to house some of its workers. The Steam Railway Museum and English Heritage, including the National Monuments Record, now occupy 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.[

Credits

Video footage
My own video footage and some with kind permission

Photos
My own
some under creative commons
A few with kind permission

Music
Royalty free and my own.

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