If I told you I was getting excited about a lot of shops selling women’s clothes and shoes, you would probably think I was going a bit funny.

But odd as it may seem, that’s how I’m feeling about the opening of the Long Shop Mall. This is the new part of the Swindon Designer Outlet that ex- railwaymen will know as J1 Shop (from its steam days), No 9 shop (from its diesel days) or simply the iron foundry.

Two things always amaze me when I go to the ‘Outlet Village’ as we wrongly call it.

The first is how popular it is. Every time I go there it is teeming with shoppers, so you don’t have to be an accountant to work out how successful it is.

The second thing is: although the shops don’t seem to have much appeal to the likes of me, a middle-aged geek who has never had an ounce of fashion sense in his entire life, it’s always a pleasure to go there.

If anything, the place should terrify me. It’s seems to be a cathedral to the idea of separating women from their money (and sometimes their husbands’ money) under the pretence of some trivial thing like getting an unnecessary new frock or yet another pair of shoes.

However, as somebody who is known to believe in heritage and isn’t afraid to admit he is proud to come from a town with an industrial heritage, these days I go there to cheer myself up.

I was recently lucky enough to get on two tours of the place.

The first was one of the excellent regular tours put on by the excellent Rodbourne Local History Group, an informative and entertaining guide to what the buildings used to be in the railway age. The second was a quick look round the Long Shop, before it opened.

Both times I came away feeling even more pride and awe about what this town achieved when it was full of highly skilled craftsmen and engineers.

It was roughly how I also felt when I attended an open evening at the new University Technical College (UTC), literally just across the tracks in Bristol Street.

Exactly the same formula of skilfully reusing old railway buildings has been adopted there, with the same stunning result of something that’s sympathetic to the site’s heritage and a place to be proud of.

But this isn’t just about us being proud of Swindon. True, it does put a spring in your step to feel pride in the place you live, but in these days when you also have to have a cold economical streak, both the Long Shop and the UTC make hard-headed financial sense to me too.

We are always being told how Swindon needs to attract investment, and how bad its image is, even though its record of attracting new people hasn’t failed it in the last 170 years, so it can’t be half as bad as it is painted.

Our political leaders are always trying to find new reasons why new businesses should come here, but the solution is always staring them in the face.

A city (as we are, in all but name) that is proud of its past looks confident about its future, and automatically sends out the right message.

Harking back shows strength, not weakness.

So how about if we stop pulling down old buildings and putting up white elephants in their place, at least as long as there are other lovely and much-loved old buildings around town to breathe new life into? Can anybody suggest one?