I’ve been waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen in Swindon. A bit like Samuel Beckett’s character in Waiting for Godot... we are sitting down under a tree by ye olde Locarno for about a year now. Or is it two or ten years? We are not quite sure as we have lost count as time passes so slowly in Swindon. In fact, I could have walked around the world twice; it takes so long for something to happen here.

The Locarno is just the same as it ever was, the elder and buddleia sprouting out of the broken windows, the nettles, dandelions and cow parsley flourishing underfoot amongst the broken glass and crisp packets, cola bottles peacefully nestling in the couch grass and the odd bird’s nest swaying in the wind. Well I mean to say, nothing is happening! Enough of the pastiche Beckett.

It has been over a year since I wrote my original letter about the shameful neglect of two fine buildings, The Locarno Corn Exchange and The Mechanics Institute. They both need repairing. Anyone passing can see that. They were once loved, why aren’t they loved still? People make suitable noises and protest movements come and go but nothing actually happens.

The blackened walls get blacker and deteriorate and nothing has been done, despite calls to put decent shuttering in the window frames and a proper fence that means business. Nothing!

So where do we go from here? I’ve written to the MPs, Prince Charles and Jeremy Paxman (before he retired from Newsnight) and I had replies from most of them. Swindon seems a bit like a sleeping giant in Lilliput on the beach, unwilling to wake up from its snoring bestial slumbers.

‘A supermarket town with lots of houses’, as my snobbish friends in Bath refer to it, but when it comes to restoring old buildings, people seem to look the other way and pretend that it’s someone else’s fault.

Last summer was brilliant for building, mending walls, putting in windows, slapping roofs on etc, but both buildings were studiously ignored by the powers that be.

Maybe 100 people with money, time and building skills should roll up their sleeves and start work to save both of them. That is before they fall down through neglect and ignorance.

Robert Stredder Holden Close Blunsdon Swindon