Swindon is fab, and I have proof. The nice people at Create Studios have released an inspiring film called Digital Journeys, a series of interviews with people explaining how they came to end up in Swindon.

It’s part of an exhibition at Steam, but you can also watch it on Create’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/swindoncreatestudios/).

I’ll let you make up your own mind about it, but if you are anything like me it will make you quite proud of the old place.

As somebody who was born here, has always lived here and can trace his ancestry back at least eight generations in Swindon, which is unusual, I am always intrigued by what brought people here.

In a year when we are celebrating 175 years of New Swindon, it’s important to realise that for virtually the whole of that period, starting from day one, the town has been welcoming wave after wave of new people.

The first were skilled railwaymen who came from all over the UK to work for Mr Gooch and Mr Brunel, and not much has really changed in all that time, except people now come from further afield.

It means Swindon is one of the most diverse places in Britain, a real melting pot of people and cultures, and by some people’s reckoning that is a recipe for trouble.

In practice, although there are always going to be some problems in somewhere the size of Swindon, we generally don’t seem to have much problem mixing with each other.

So what’s the secret of our success?

Although many people living here are technically foreigners, immigrants, outsiders or any other word you might choose to describe people who started off somewhere else (or their parents did), nobody stays a stranger for very long in Swindon, not when so many of his or her neighbours remember what it felt like when they were strangers themselves.

As for those of us who have never known what it’s like to live in a place as a stranger: after 175 years of practice, we should be as good as any city in the world at making people welcome.

And I think we are.

When you are born in a place and have never lived anywhere else, it’s difficult to see what others see, but relative newcomers tell me Swindon is far friendlier than most other places, and there is a proper sense of community here.

The stories recounted in Digital Journeys include a white South African (Lord Joffe) who turned his back on the Apartheid regime and came to the UK when Australia wouldn’t have him, and a man who fled from an African war zone and arrived as a refugee, hanging on to the underside of a bus.

Others came here because of work or because house prices are more affordable than in, say, London, and after hearing all their stories, I was struck by a thought.

Of those who have settled in Swindon, very few seem to have come here because it was their first choice, but rather they mostly arrived because of some accident of fate.

That’s a shame, but then I thought again and decided that the most important choices you make in life are not about where to go, but whether you should stay.

In a town that has been growing non-stop, from zero in 1841 to 216,000 today, and is showing no signs of stopping any time soon, an awful lot of people have chosen to stay in Swindon in the last 175 years, and we should give ourselves more credit for that.

Because if it isn’t proof that somewhere is fab, then I would like to know what is.