WELCOME to the central Swindon of today and of years, decades and centuries gone by.

It’s a place where the past overlies the present and vice versa, and can be a bit disconcerting for the newcomer.

Your best bet on arrival is to get your bearings by the town hall, but try not to be flattened by a tram. They’re surprisingly quiet.

That’s assuming the town hall is there, of course. Don’t be surprised if there’s just a farm track and a row of terraced cottages where you expected Regent Circus to be.

If you’re in the mood for a spot of retail therapy, you can choose from countless generations of shops as they swim in and out of existence, selling everything from mangles and boot scrapers to platform soles and mobile phones the size of housebricks. A word of caution, though: before stepping out on to the top floor of the Brunel Centre, make sure there really is a top floor.

You could always go for a drink to calm your nerves, but if you choose the handsome art deco Rudi’s in Regent Circus, double check to make sure it hasn’t morphed into the Corporation Electricity Showrooms while you weren’t looking.

Of course, it’s impossible to do anything like this for real, but a new book offers something close.

Central Swindon Through Time is the latest work by prolific local historian and author Mark Child, and follows an earlier volume called Swindon Old Town Through Time. Mr Child shows historic pictures side by side with new ones taken from the same locations, showing the changes wrought over the years.

“I started work on this book last October,” said Mr Child. “When I put the old one to bed I started researching this one, although ‘research’ is an odd thing to say because it’s information that I got over a long period of time.”

Where possible, the modern shots were taken from the same spots as the old ones, but this wasn’t always feasible.

“When you take photographs like that,” the author explained, “you realise how many roadworks are going on and how long they take.”

The images highlight the architectural differences between the New and Old Towns.

Mr Child said: “The main difference is that Old Town evolved over centuries and New Swindon sprang up from the 1840s. There-fore we’ve got a whole area of architecture that never existed in New Swindon – ie pre-early Victorian.

“New Swindon before the railway came was just a few farms and cottages and really nothing else. New Town was largely speculative outside the railway Village. Builders put up terraces and hoped there would be people to put in them.”

Mr Child believes the Mechanics Institute is the most interesting and important New Town building, and the town hall the nicest.

And the best of the current crop? “I think the new library is best. It fits in with the town hall. It’s what I would class as Swindon’s only building to provide something approximating architecture that’s functional and good to look at.”

Central Swindon Through Time is published by Amberley and priced at £9.99. It is available at Waterstones in the Brunel Centre, Pen and Paper in Victoria Road, from Amazon and direct from the publisher, whose website is www.amberley-books.com