A FLOCK of sheep is herded into Old Town’s ancient Market Square on a bright morning during the 19th Century. Downtown, in the late Victorian/early Edwardian era, men huddle around a brazier to ward off the chill as shoppers swarm amongst the stalls in the Cromwell Street Market in the days before it had a roof.

Children in their Sunday best scamper across Wroughton High Street as a horse-drawn carriage conveying several villagers ambles by. In Swindon town centre, a man in overalls is about to negotiate bustling Fleet Street with a hand trolley as a tram trundles towards him.

With its rustic cottages and steep climb, Albert Street in Old Town resembles the backdrop of a Hovis advert while a mile or so down the hill in Curtis Street, a youngster cheerfully wheels a hoop across the road.

Fast forward to the 1940s and some Army lads are milling around King Street tucking into their fish and chips and chatting to women passing by with their children, one pushing a heavy duty pram.

They are everyday scenes from Swindon’s past lane – images from vanished eras that only exist today thanks to the singular work of artist Phil King who, over 40 years, has produced “hundreds and hundreds” of impressions of long-gone Swindon.

Phil’s work depicts our town as it largely was decades and decades ago. His colourful depictions, often covering the period before the arrival of colour photography, show us what Swindon must have looked like in times gone by – a technicolour alternative to monochrome photos.

Many of the buildings in Phil’s paintings don’t exist anymore – from the Baptist Tabernacle to demolished sections of the railway works and long-gone structures such as the town centre fire station in Cromwell Street.

Others have mercifully survived the ravages of time and the whims of town planners but look very different today to those painted by Phil, such as The Bell in High Street with its fashionable late 19th/early 20th Century frontage and the once distinguished Old Town Hall/Corn Exchange that has long become a sight of sad dereliction.

Several of the streets that Phil has painted have vanished too – Brunel Street, Cromwell Street, Rolleston Street, Cow Lane – while others have been seriously curtailed – Byron Street, Wellington Street, Vilett Street, Havelock Street – after being sacrificed for new development, modernisation and infrastructure.

Shops that have also disappeared – as they tend to – live on in Phil’s works, which are largely based on vistas copied from photographs and postcards. Adding vibrancy to such scenes, he populated his pieces with people from his recollections, or simply from his imagination. And there’s nowt wrong, of course, with a spot of artistic licence in such circumstances.

Now 78, father-of-two Phil continues to work from his studio hideaway concocted with “bits of junk and scrap” at his terraced home in Pinehurst.

“When I first began to paint in the Seventies I got interested in Old Swindon and really enjoyed painting scenes of the streets,” he said. “Swindon was everything I knew, I suppose, so I concentrated on that.”

When Phil speaks of Old Swindon he refers not just to the Old Town on the hill but to the New Town below that emerged around the railway works – the redbrick settlement that engulfed fields and villages from the 1840s.

From the 1960s, however, Phil’s Old Swindon began to vanish as the town reacted to the pressures of rapid expansion with demands for newer and bigger retail, leisure and educational facilities while also responding to the meteoric rise of the motor car.

Town centre housing erected decades earlier was flattened to make way for shops, offices, roads and car parks as a new New Town replaced the old New Town.

“Swindon like it used to be was disappearing very quickly,” he said.

“The backstreets were going, the railway works was going – factories like Garrards were being knocked down.

“The old market place was demolished. Lots of pubs that I remember just went.”

Capturing such scenes in his art became an ongoing passion.

He took photographs of streets – particularly those about to undergo drastic change – on which to base his paintings. He also amassed vintage pictures and postcards of local scenes that he was keen to paint.

“I’ve got thousands of them.”

Phil went on: “The old Swindon streets were fascinating. I knew them so well. I also wanted to include people (in the paintings) that I remembered – a man pushing a wheelbarrow, a child playing with a hoop, youngsters running around in the road… an old lady I once saw sitting in the street with a dog begging. Things like that stayed in my mind.”

Having grown up in Stratton, Phil considered himself a “country boy.” Every weekend he’d walk to Swindon for Saturday morning flicks at The Savoy (now the pub of the same name.) “I’d pay four pence to get in and then buy a cake from Castle’s Bakery before walking home.”

He was in his late 40s when he accidentally took up painting. Having gone to night school to enrol in pottery classes he was told it was fully booked.

He didn’t fancy the alternative, which was art, but struck a deal with an aunt and her pal – they’d pay his class fees if he drove them to the Hreod school sessions.

Under the tutelage of Peter Hunt, and inspired by esteemed locomotive artist David Shepherd, Phil began painting Swindon, forging a style of his own as he recreated scenes from bygone eras.

Fifteen years later in 1991 Phil, then 54, staged the first of many exhibitions, Impressions of Vintage Swindon at the Link Centre, comprising 40 works based on lost views of his home town.

By then he had sold several paintings that fetched between £45 and £150, depending on size. Countless more followed, some of which have been snapped up by people who had recognised their long-gone haunts in Phil’s evocative recreations.

“I once did a painting of Lloyds Bank next to the old canal in the town centre, near the old Red Lion, which an elderly lady bought because that was the spot – just a muddy patch really – where she played when she was a child.”

Sadly, there is little chance of a Phil King Swindon Retrospective as these works – and he has no idea how many he’s actually produced – are hanging in homes far and wide.

“They’re all over Swindon, some are even abroad – Canada, New Zealand – so many have been bought... there are hundreds and hundreds of them.”

  •  HE didn’t appreciate it at the time but in 1995 Phil King was afforded one of the greatest compliments an artist can be paid – some of his paintings were stolen.
    Two 18 by 14 inch scenes of Swindon town centre during the early 20th Century – both including trams – vanished from an exhibition at the Link Centre. 
    “The thief must have smuggled them out in a large bag – obviously, I’m very disappointed,” he told us.
    Exasperated and deflated, he soon gave up hope of ever seeing them again. 
    Twelve years later Phil happened to be wandering around a gallery in Gloucester when he came face-to-face with one of the missing works. 
    “I was absolutely stunned...” But he couldn’t just take it home – he had to prove he had created the work, a beautiful impression of Swindon Town Hall, and that it was still lawfully his. 
    Luckily, the Adver reported the theft back in ’95 and illustrated the article with a photo of the very piece he had rediscovered – which he was able to reclaim after producing the cutting.
    The other filched work – Regent Street with the department store McIlroys in the background – is still out there somewhere.

  • ONE of Phil’s favourite Old Swindon subjects has been the adjoining, once imposing mid-19th Century landmark The Old Town Hall/ Corn Exchange.
    Which is hardly surprising, as he once saw it countless times every day working for Old Town office equipment firm Dobell & Shearman as a typewriter technician.
    “The clock on the tower used to tick away the hours of my day. Look at it now – decimated.”
    Phil, who later ran a typewriter shop in Broad Street, today paints views of the Cotswolds, having all but exhausted his Swindon vistas of yesteryear.
    Asked if he still has any of the Old Swindon stuff, Phil scurried off to the shed before returning a few minutes later with a war-time victory celebration in Rodbourne and Regent Street around a century ago.
    All the others have long since been snapped up.

    In recent years Phil has narrated a series of dvds of old Swindon footage entitled Swindon Through the Decades produced by Gorse Hill based company AVP.