THIS week half a century ago, the biggest story with a Swindon angle was also a national and international one.

The year before, The Moody Blues had secured themselves a place in sixties pop history with the iconic Nights in White Satin, written by Justin Hayward and taken from an equally iconic album, Days of Future Passed.

With a new album due, our music columnist wrote: “Watch out for The Moody Blues.

“After concentrating on making a big impression abroad they aim to establish themselves in strength on the home disc front.

“Their new stage act, complete with orchestra-reproducing mellotron, has the group producing an incredibly big and varied sound for a quintet.

“They are hoping for big things with a wistful building ballad, Voices in the Sky, penned by their Swindon-born member, Justin Hayward (he wrote their Nights in White Satin hit), on a Deram single, and an album on the same label entitled In Search of the Lost Chord, from which it is taken.

“At a kind of Moody Blues ‘at home’ at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, I listened as they demonstrated other tracks from the album like the really pounding Ride My See-Saw with great bursts of sound from the mellotron, and Peak Hour, with the group’s ‘churchy’ harmony singing to the fore.”

The mellotron, as fans of vintage instruments will know, was an early type of synthesiser whose keys activated tape loops.

In the summer of 1968, a group of pupils at a Swindon school were looking rather further ahead than the next album by a superstar band.

We said: “Towering blocks of circular flats, a vast three-storey civic centre and an intricate hover-rail system - these are some of the ideas for the Swindon of 2000AD formulated by pupils of Park Senior High School.

“The team of five has thought up some revolutionary and imaginative ideas which have been judged the winning entry in a project competition.”

Students Elizabeth Robinson, Margaret Straiton, Rosamond Gingell, Lawrence Evenett and Barry Mills beat four other teams to win the Swindon heat of the competition, which was organised by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.

We added: “The team made the radical decision of scrapping Swindon in its present form completely.

“The city, as they think it will be by the year 2000, has been divided up into variously-sized circles or zones.

“In the middle is the city centre with its huge civic building, christened the Strata-Dome. In its three storeys it houses shops with their warehouses underneath, a library, police, fire brigade (both making use of the heliport on the top), a restaurant and a vast sports area.

“Outside this lie the industrial (completely enclosed in plastic), residential and recreational areas.”

Swindon never did see such a remarkable structure, although many sites across the town were either being changed or earmarked for it.

The week saw us run a series of aerial views. The only one to survive in our archives is dominated by what was then still the Pressed Steel factory, would later become part of British Leyland and is now BMW.

Visible details include the building which is now the Dockle Farmhouse pub and the edge of the site now occupied by the Greenbridge retail park.

Closer to the centre of town, the latest Swindon College extension was growing in a cage of scaffolding. “One more storey is to be added,” we said, “making a total of eight, and access from the present building will be on the ground, third and fifth floor levels.

“There will be room for television and music studies, and a new single-storey workshop block.

“This site covers 54,000 square feet, and the total cost of the block, which is to be completed towards the end of next year, will be about £444,000.”

A rather sad story involving the RSPCA and cats came to us from Chiseldon, where an inspector refused to continue trapping feral felines after locals accused him of taking family pets away.

We said: “One of the residents wrote that the traps had been set near a derelict corn dryer and that it was a place known to attract cats, most of which were pets.

“This was done without warning, and his pet cat had been missing since the time the traps were known to have been set.”

The RSPCA was evidently very different from the organisation we know now. The inspector said he’d been sent to trap wild cats at the request of another villager, and had caught and killed two which were clearly feral.

We added: “He said that when he received complaints about the trapping, he kept the two corpses and invited inspection for identification, but none of the people who complained had come to take advantage of this.

“In view of the complaints about the trapping, he had declined to go back to Chiseldon to finish trapping the remaining wild cats.”