Swindon
— — a railway town that kept its workshop light.
Not only on a wall.
“Swindon is a Wiltshire town that grew up around the Great Western Railway works, opened in 1843 by Isambard Kingdom Brunel as the half-way servicing point between London and Bristol. At its peak the works employed around 14,000 people and built locomotives that ran on every continent. The original engine shed is now the STEAM museum, and the model village of stone cottages Brunel laid out for the workers still stands beside it. Above the town, the chalk downs run out toward Avebury. from the studio
Swindon, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Swindon is the largest town in Wiltshire, in south-west England, set on the northern edge of the Marlborough Downs about 80 miles west of London. The 2021 census recorded the borough population at around 233,000. The town divides into Old Town, on a low hill of Corallian limestone that gave the original settlement its name, and New Swindon, the railway town laid out in the 1840s on the level ground below. Direct trains from London Paddington reach the station in roughly an hour.
The Great Western Railway works opened in 1843 at the half-way point between London Paddington and Bristol Temple Meads, chosen by Isambard Kingdom Brunel as the natural servicing depot for the line. At its peak in the 1930s the works employed about 14,000 people and covered 326 acres, making it the largest railway engineering complex in Europe. Brunel and his architect Matthew Digby Wyatt laid out the Railway Village in 1845, a grid of 300 stone cottages for the workers, which still stands as one of the earliest planned industrial settlements in Britain.
STEAM, the Museum of the Great Western Railway, occupies the former locomotive works on Kemble Drive and holds the surviving Castle and King Class engines built on site. The Designer Outlet next door reuses the great iron-framed carriage shop of 1873, its roof span still carried on the original cast columns. Six miles south of the town the National Trust manages Avebury, the largest stone circle in Europe, and the chalk White Horse at Uffington, cut into the hillside around 1000 BC, sits twelve miles to the north-east.