LAST year about 20,000 people visited the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery in Bath Road.

That figure includes many who visit every month, every week or even every day, and who are therefore counted more than once.

Or to put it another way, there are a good 170,000 people in this neck of the woods who have yet to experience the greatest collection of 20th Century British art outside London.

I envy each of those 170,000 because something amazing awaits them.

In exchange for a fee of precisely nothing – all donations are welcome, mind you – any of us can stroll from the bustle of Old Town and into the presence of a Lowry, a Freud, a Hambling or some astonishing work in about 30 seconds flat.

Whatever we see in the gallery belongs to us, although as it belongs to everybody else too, we’re not at liberty to take it home and see how it looks over the mantelpiece.

With economic woes continuing, it’s tempting to think art is something we shouldn’t bother with until we have less to worry about, but some people believe the very opposite is true.

Among them is Sophie Cummings, interim curator at the museum and art gallery and also collections manager at Lydiard House.

“When times are tough,” she said, “it’s important that people have places to go, whether the place is an art gallery or a museum, where they can reflect and hopefully be inspired.

“There have always been problems in society and society has always created and displayed art. We create museums and art galleries as a way to let people experience their history – their local history and their national history – and to show beautiful and interesting objects.”

There are about 150 paintings in the collection, together with other pieces including drawings, collages, prints and sculptures. Its nucleus was a group of paintings donated by a remarkable philanthropist called HJP Bomford in 1944, and pieces have been added through bequests and judicious purchases, often using grants from various arts organisations.

Display space at the gallery is limited, so a rolling programme of exhbitions is needed to make sure as many pieces as possible are seen. The council is exploring ways to provide a bigger gallery space, and Sophie thinks it’s a great idea.

“It would bring a lot of people to Swindon,” she said. “The collection is good enough to bring tourists into the area. We already get people who come to Swindon to see it.”

The current exhibition, which runs until December, is called They Take Art Seriously In Swindon, and is linked to an arts charity called the Public Catalogue Foundation. “It’s aimed at getting every painting in public collections photographed and put on a public website,” said Sophie.

“The Public Catalogue Foundation were particularly impressed by the Swindon art collection. They printed their own little guide to the collection and there was a launch attended by Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.”

The single gallery space contains the cream of British artistic genius from the last 100 years. There’s Lowry’s A Procession, for example, which is only 50cm by 35cm but full of the power that has made his work instantly recognisable.

There’s Howard Hodgkin’s Gramophone, one of Sophie’s favourite pieces, in which the shape of the machine is only slightly discernible amid colours and shapes evoking the sounds it produces.

There’s Maggi Hambling’s Descent Of The Bull’s Head, a large canvas showing the horrific last moments of a bullfight.

There’s another of Sophie’s favourites, Ship Amid Tall Waves by Alfred Wallis, a small and simple work in oil and pencil on cardboard, which has the unschooled, spontaneous look of folk art.

There are many other works, each with its own story and its own intensity.

The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday from 11am to 3pm. The Public Catalogue Foundation’s website is www.thepcf.org.uk