Historic Houses | Author, Jane Lark's stories

As I said in my previous posts, three of the things that lead me to ideas for books are people, places and pictures. Previously, I have told you about some of the people and three of the places, so let me carry on from where I left off and tell you about one last place behind the GWR Girls series, which is a very particular place, and actually may have been the first place that gave me the idea to write this series set partly in the works and partly in the railway village. This is the tunnel that runs underneath the train tracks in Swindon, enabling people to reach the works directly from the railway village where the workers houses are. This was built in 1870s, and actually highlights one the aspects of the story that I have deliberately written inaccurately (those, I will come onto in later posts). The carriage works were built on the the railway village side of the tracks in the 1860s and the tunnel goes through this building and under the tracks. Like many of the buildings in this historic area of Swindon, the building is listed, you can click on the picture above to see the Grade II listing for the works entrance.

I have walked through this underpass hundreds of times during my life, my daughter and I often used to cycle into town and used this tunnel. It is surprisingly long, and low ceilinged, and when you see the pictures of the time when this was a gate into the factory and men used it in their hundreds… Well it stirs my imagination, of the conversations and the emotions that were experienced inside this… In my books, the tunnel will also become an air raid shelter during the war.

It is a very atmospheric space, I think for me maybe because I get quite nervous within it as I am a bit claustrophobic, but even that emotion stirs up my imagination. It is odd how just these single spaces and moments can prod a novel to flow…

Just one more inspiration post to go, the one about pictures….

As I said in my previous post, three of the things that lead me to ideas for books are people, places and pictures. Last time I told you about some of the people, over the next three days I will tell you about some of the places behind the GWR Girls series.

I have split the places up so I can include lots of pictures!

I grew up living near Swindon, in Shrivenham and then Faringdon. I often travelled into Swindon town. My father worked in a factory there. Then I started working in the town and for a couple of years I commuted daily before moving into Swindon when I was twenty-one. So, the Railway Village cottages, the hostel that was the old railway museum, and the park and swimming pool, were places I have known for as long as I can remember. However, despite having had a daughter who I took to the STEAM – Museum of the Great Western Railway a few times, I had never made the time to get to the small museum in Swindon’s historic Railway Village.

So, three years ago, I finally did make the time to go along and look around the beautiful, if compact, 34 Faringdon Road – the Railway Village Museum, that captures a moment in Victorian life in the Railway Village. The layout, though it is earlier than the date of my books, was still inspirational. For instance, I visited at Christmas and paperchains hung around the room, and of course they were using open fires as my families would have, and old stoves, as well as tin baths, and outside toilets. Seeing things in real life, feeling them and hearing them, does help a writer to bring things to life in words.

I have included a few photos so you can see what a perfect little time capsule of a museum this is on the inside. This gallery of pictures from the ground floor. The cottage is the layout I have used for Maggie’s family in the Great Western Railway Girls.

These images are from the ground floor, there are two original rooms on the ground floor of the foreman’s cottage and a lean-to extension that incorporated the outside water pipe and created a kitchen.

The below images are from the upstairs room. The foreman’s cottages have three bedrooms. It was a frequent reality that people rented out rooms, as Violet’s mother does in my story, to bring in more money.