ABSTRACT
Introduction In 1841, with a population of only 2500, Swindon was selected by the Great Western Railway as the site for the rail engineering works which dominated the town up to the last war. Wartime industrial relocation and the postwar boom in consumer goods industries, electrical engineering and the car industry then brought a wave of new employers and a major influx of population. Collapse of manufacturing employment in the 1970s was more than offset by rapid expansion of financial and business services, distribution and new manufacturing sectors including plastics, electronics and pharmaceuticals. The town’s workforce has virtually doubled since the early 1950s and its population expanded from 91,000 in 1951 to 151,000 by 1981. Until the last war it had all the characteristics of a northern industrial town, but one in the middle of rural Wiltshire. By the late 1980s it was a key growth centre in the booming M4 corridor.This account looks first at successive phases of expansion which have reworked the town’s economic and employment structure. It identifies the key role of new employers in job growth, the increased ‘internationalization’ of the ‘local’ economy, the changing gender composition of the workforce, and shifts in terms of corporate 1 Keith Bassett works in the Department o f Geography, University of Bristol, Martin Boddy and John Lovering at the School for Advanced Urban Studies, University of Bristol, and Michael Harloe in the Department of Sociology at Essex University. We would like to thank Gill Court and Jane Wills, research students at SAUS, for their contribution to the work on which this chapter draws. The main body o f research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council’s ‘Changing Urban and Regional System’ initiative, grant DO 4250015. Some supporting information is drawn from parallel work carried out under the ESRC’s ‘Social Change and Economic Life’ (SCEL) initiative, grant G 13250014 - specific reference is made to information drawn from this source, which drew on extensive surveys of individuals and employers.
