Swindon | 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….

So, as happens sometimes, life events and health took over and the posts I had planned had to be pushed onto the back burner, but hopefully now I will have some time to write again.

As I said in my previous post, 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 one of the places, so let me carry on from where I left off and tell you about another place behind the GWR Girls series.

Number two on my list of places I have already mentioned, that is the STEAM – Museum of the Great Western Railway in Swindon, which was opened in the millennium year, 2000. It is positioned in the former GWR workshops. As I said in my last post, I visited the museum quite a few times. I took my daughter when she was small, and, when I worked for Swindon Borough Council who own the museum, I used to run training sessions and hold and attend meetings in the rooms in the museum. What I love about the set up there, is that there are lots of spaces where scenes of working life are recreated, in life size models, a captured moment in time, and not only that there are sounds. The museum plays the sounds appropriate to the scenes. Which means as a writer I have the opportunity to think, how would I describe that. Then there are the personal descriptions from the people who worked there, describing what they experienced. Also items that hint at the life of the people who worked there—the checking in pegs, the glass framed foremen’s offices on their stilts in the corners of the spaces. I love the life-size platform that is set up for the 1940s era, and I like sitting in the carriages.

Of course, for anyone with an engineering and technical brain there are plenty of actual trains to look around. But for me, with my overactive imagination, I just love the storytelling style of the museum. It has really brought things to life for me and many of the things I describe in my book I can only describe because I saw them in the museum.

There are more things I could say about inspirations I have gained from this museum but that would give away parts of the plot!

I would definitely recommend a visit, though.