Wednesday 14th August 2013

As any regular readers of this blog will know, I've written a lot about the public art that we are so lucky to have here in Swindon - much of which I'm slowly discovering.  I did know that the Swindon local collection had photos of some of Swindon's art works but I didn't, until tonight, know just how much. Now, yet again thanks to interactions on the Twittersphere, I have been further enlightened. They have a wonderful set of 257 photos, some of them with associated information, of Swindon's art works. Many of them are now sadly lost but luckily many are still with us.

Clearly I haven't gone through all 257 with a fine toothcomb but just a quick scroll through reveals the diversity of the art that Swindon has had and still does have. I've written elsewhere on this blog about 'Looking to the future', the sculpture of the sunbathers over at West Swindon, so it was great to see some pictures of it in this gallery when it was all shiny and new. On the subject of that sculpture, one of my faves, Swindon Viewpoint, the community television folk, have a film in the archives on their website of the then artist in residence, Jon Buck, at work on it. Amazing! Unsurprisingly and thankfully there are also a lot of pictures of Ken White's work, amongst many, many more. Some of which I was aware of - but much that I was ignorant of.

So yeah, it's a great pity that so much of this splendid public art has been lost but thank goodness for the Swindon Local collection and for Swindon Viewpoint. Between them, at least Swindon has got a record of it all. So three cheers for them - that's what I say.