The Refreshment Rooms at Swindon
The next time you stop at Swindon and grab a coffee, you might be astonished to discover that the refreshment rooms at Swindon were both famous and infamous (also possibly remind yourself of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias with a quick search on your phone).
Here’s the Devizes & Wiltshire Gazette 1842 with its description of the refreshment rooms (the contract for the building of the station specified that every passing train had to stop at Swindon for a potentially lucrative refreshment break): ‘… the station itself is the handsomest we have yet seen … there are four large refreshment rooms, two on each side of the road, of noble proportions, and finished in the most exquisite style … walls panelled … fireplaces … beautifully painted ceilings. Such rooms cannot fail to improve greatly the taste of every one who enters them… ‘
The refreshment stop was for just ten minutes, however, which did not contribute to improvement of taste; here is a textual depiction of the mad dash at Swindon from Doyle and Leigh in 1849 that went alongside their cartoon Manners and Customs of ye Englyshe: ‘Before we had half finished, the Guard rang the Bell, and my Wife with a Start, did spill her Soup over her Dress, and was obliged to leave Half of it; and to think how ridiculous I looked, scampering back to the Train with my Meat-pie in my Mouth! To run hurry-skurry at the Sound of a Bell, do seem only fit for a Gang of Workmen; and the Bustle of Railways do destroy all the Dignity of Travelling; but the World altogether is less Grand, and do go faster than formerly’.
Let’s finish with Charles Dickens again, From The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. 1857; it’s not about Swindon but it certainly captures the atmosphere of a busy railway station at a junction with a railway works.
‘It was a Junction-Station, where the wooden razors … shaved the air very often, and where the sharp electric-telegraph bell was in a very restless condition. All manner of cross-lines came zig-zagging into it … and, a little way out of it, a pointsman in an elevated signal-box was constantly going through the motions of drawing immense quantities of beer at a public-house bar. In one direction, confused quantities of embankments and arches … in the other, the rails soon disentangled themselves into two tracks, and shot away under a bridge and curved round a corner. Sidings were there, in which empty luggage vans and cattle-boxes often butted against each other … and warehouses were there… Refreshment-rooms were there; one, for the hungry and thirsty Iron Locomotives where their coke and water were ready … the other, for the hungry and thirsty humans … who might take what they could get…’