Wichelstowe, Swindon: Exploring the Edgelands

I went out to Wichelstowe on a hot, bright Saturday morning with the Leica M11 and the 28mm Elmarit, looking for edgelands.

Edgelands are the in-between bits of a town, the parts that are neither open countryside nor properly built up. Canals, retail parks, allotments, motorway verges, paths you walk through without really looking at. Towns expand around them but they tend to stick around regardless. I wanted to start photographing them properly, and Wichelstowe, one of the expanded villages on the edge of Swindon and still going up, seemed like the obvious place to begin.

The 28mm did what I needed it to do. Places like this are cluttered and half-finished and layered, and a wide lens let me get all of that into one frame instead of isolating a single detail.

Houses still going up on one side, exposed ironwork sitting in half-laid roads, builders' yards backing straight onto footpaths and drainage channels, plant and machinery left standing in fields that haven't been touched yet.

I wasn't out there looking for a chocolate box version of Swindon, and I don't think that's what edgelands are for. I wanted the vernacular, the stuff that's actually there: red site barriers, a bus shelter with nobody waiting at it, a farm gate strung with yellow barriers instead of a five-bar gate, purple loosestrife growing straight out of the canal with new-build rooftops behind it.

I finished the walk with coffee and a good breakfast, and I'll be going back.

Wichelstowe, Swindon: Exploring the Edgelands

Swindon Oasis - November 2025

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