Swindon – rural village that used to be a hive of industry

Huge factory once employed hundreds

- By TERRY CHURCH Bugle correspondent

Scenes from the opening of Swindon and Smestow's new cricket pavilion in 1955

IN January 2026 I was invited to be the Guest Speaker at the meeting of Himley and Swindon Ladies Group. The meeting was held in the Swindon Community Centre and the visit, for me, was filled with nostalgia. Way back in 1958 a short spell of my early working life was spent on that site!

Anyone driving through the village of Swindon (in Staffordshire, not the other much larger one in Wiltshire) may not be aware that until the early 1970s it was a hive of industry. The village may well have been referred to as a hamlet with perhaps a couple of hundred residents, but a steelworks was based at the side of the canal with the site employing up to five hundred people, many of them residents of Wall Heath.

The first forge at Swindon was converted from a corn mill by Thomas Foley in 1647. By 1934 it was owned by George and Ernest Thorneycroft of Wolverhampton and was producing iron and steel rods.

In 1866 it was leased to EP and W Baldwin who had become the owners by 1899. In 1873 the works consisted of twelve puddling furnaces and two mills producing sheet iron.

Into the 20th century and in 1945 the works became Richard Thomas & Baldwins Ltd. After nationalisation the works were known as British Steel Corporation, Swindon Works. The end product was sheet steel converted from slabs of steel which were brought to the factory by barge, having travelled from the RTB sites in the valleys of south Wales.