FOOTAGE of Swindon not seen for three decades is going online in a series of short films.

Former Swindon Cable cameraman and presenter Paul Langcaster saved dozens of old tapes from being thrown out when the firm closed down 16 years ago and took them to his home in Old Town

“They wanted to put it all in a skip,” he said. “I kept as much as I could and some went to the Wiltshire and Swindon Records Office. It has been in the loft for goodness know how long.”

That was until last summer when he decided to go through it all and turn some of the footage into a series of short films showing Swindon then and now.

“What has made it more accessible is that you can edit it all on a Mac,” he explained. “I’ve done it really as a bit of a hobby.

“It feels like this is quite a good way of using them to remind people of what Swindon looked like.”

The clips are all part of a library of stock shots of the town and were used for various programmes and news reports broadcast by the station in the early 1980s.

One of the more significant buildings to feature is the Mechanics' Institute.

“At the time the story we did pictures for was that it was about to come to the end of its life,” he said.

It was still being used as a social club for staff at the nearby railway works, but shortly after the footage was shut, but the works and the institute were closed down.

Paul’s images from last summer show the iconic building boarded up and overgrown.

“One thing that struck me was how many Swindon schools have disappeared since the 1980s,” he said. Even though many of them had been replaced by modern buildings, the architecture had changed markedly and lots of historic buildings had gone.

The series of six shorts called Swindon Through the Years are being uploaded to a Youtube channel in the coming weeks. The last one is all about the railway works, which was for many years the lifeblood of the town.

“Around that time there was a lot of talk about the works shutting. While we were making that programme it was announced that they would close.”

“Some of the shots I struggled to remember,” he admitted.

At one point he went on to social media for help identifying a flower stallholder who appeared in one of the clips. Sometimes he was unable to work out where the original locations were.

The films can be found on a Swindon Cable Television YouTube channel: bit.ly/2h6gMM0