Art on Tour: The Story of Swindon's Modern Art Collection

You will be aware that Swindon's Spring Festival became a Virtual Festival due to Covid-19 restrictions. What you might not be aware of, is the fact that you can still watch the whole festival online, buy clicking on here
Art On Tours, Katie Ackrill gave an excellent account of Swindon's Modern Art Collection on  Saturday 16 May at 11am, and you can watch the whole video here.
The introductory information on the Spring Festival site says:
'People are often surprised to hear that Swindon owns one of the best collections of Modern British Art in the UK, with artworks by both nationally known and local artists. This vibrant talk for the Swindon Spring Festival will tell the story of Swindon’s art collection, through 12 fascinating artworks. Katie will reveal stories interwoven with these pieces, and reveal how they came to be in Swindon This talk will be available, free of charge, via Swindon Museum and Art Gallery’s YouTube Channel, and Swindon Spring Festival’s YouTube Channel.
Wiltshire-based exhibitions coordinator Katie Ackrill works out of the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery.'
Katie gives a great account of the fascinating stories behind the acquisition of the collection in true festival style. I will include here a few of the works Katie talked about.

This is 'Composition in Black and White' by Ben Nicholson

 and the Patrick Hayman's 'Captain James Cook in New Zealand'

and also 'Port of Bristol' by Paul Methuen

But do click on the link above to hear the whole talk
If this has whetted your appetite for more, quite a few of the works in the collection are listed on the ArtUK website, why not have a look?

THE Museum of Computing a talk by Jeremy Holt

In the halcyon days at the turn of 2020, we brought out an ambitious and exciting programme of talks and trips for the first half of the year, and held our first talk by Professor David Manley who gave an excellent insight into the artist Charles Houghton Howard and his contemporaries in February. We are all by now familiar with what happened next, Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdown and social distancing measures have meant that everything has been cancelled for the forseeable future.
Undeterred, Katie Ackrill and Mags Parker, Art on Tour Engagement officers have started up a fantastic online facility, including 8 podcasts, with another being released this morning as part of the Swindon Spring Festival.
When it became obvious that we are now in this situation for a long time, we talked about how we could continue to provide something for the Friends' membership, and decided to go ahead if possible with our talks' programme using an online facility. Jeremy Holt was kind enough to be the first speaker to give his talk via Zoom, we were all very nervous about how it would go, but I'm pleased to say it went really well, and we are hoping to hold more virtual talks in the coming months. I think we realised that we not only miss the talks, but it's so good to see people's faces which we were able to do when the talk took place. We had 43 people taking part, and since some of those were couples sitting at a computer, I think we can estimate there were 50 participants which is fantastic.
I was not able to download the photos from the PowerPoint presentation, so am using the screenshots which aren't of the best quality, but give you an idea of the slides.

Jeremy Holt and Simon Webb had the idea in the 1990s to open a computer museum in Swindon, and worked towards realising this idea, firstly by looking for premises. When the University of Bath in Swindon opened in Walcot, they were offered some space in there, and opened up in 2003, approaching Bletchley Park for help in supplying exhibits. They had a mock up Enigma machine and a Bond decoder.
Jeremy then talked a bit about what you need for a museum which although it seems obvious, I'm going to list here because I thought it was very useful. Firstly exhibits the public can come and see, secondly the exhibits need conserving, for example plastic leads mustn't touch the computer, there also needs to be education; the computer museum provided coding classes for children, with 40 volunteers leading these. Jeremy also mentioned that you need to change half of exhibitions every 6 months to encourage people to make return visits.

Above is a slide giving examples of their exhibitions.
After the University in Walcot moved on, they needed to find new premises, somewhere easily accessible and visible to the general public. They were able to move to their present premises in Theatre Square, and had a grand opening attended by many important people, including the mayor in 2009.

There must be an Advertiser article, but I can't find it at the moment.

I love this photo taken around the time they acquired the new premises and were moving in there, it shows Jeremy Holt on the left, and curator Simon Webb on the right.

And above some of their volunteers.
Many of you may have seen the Sinclair C5 outside the museum when it's open, and here are photos of Sir Clive Sinclair when he visited the museum:

You can also see there were 42 participants when this slide was shown, the Duke of Kent also visited:

and by this time in the talk, there were 43 participants

 I thought it was very interesting to see the future goals, what a great idea to have such ambitious goals, and I certainly would like to organise a Friends' visit to the Computing Museum next year

 and thank you once again to Jeremy Holt and his wife Antonia, who gave some vital technical back up before and during the talk; for giving us our first virtual talk via Zoom. I hope we will have more before long, I will let Friends of Swindon Museum and Art Gallery know via email when these will take place.
I also found a few more links to the Museum of Computing by searching online
It also appears in the 15 Best things to do in Swindon
and has a Wikpedia page