In the Old Town high street, beneath a union jack, the wine merchant’s blackboard lures customers with the promise of 150 new gins. Nearby, the Wood Street food hall sells only fresh, local food and fish from sustainable stocks, while the Italian deli struggles to cope with the rush at lunchtime.

Sitting 80 miles down the M4 corridor from London, the town of Swindon is for most of its inhabitants a thriving community, with near full employment and low net immigration of around 600 last year. Community cohesion is strong, the BNP do not roam the streets and in the last elections Ukip failed to win a single council seat.

Businessman Tom French was one of the 55% in Swindon who voted to leave Europe, a decision that perhaps challenges the orthodoxy that it was predominantly forgotten towns and disenfranchised people who were at the heart of the revolt against Europe.

French, who works in the leisure industry, said: “The main thing for me was the rules and the regulations and the issue of control. The EU has moved away from its original conception. We can be part of Europe but we need to be able to trade with whoever we want to, we needed to take back control.”

The turmoil on the markets and the political vacuum at Westminster has not concerned French. “It was a massive decision of course, and I do worry a little, but but I wouldn’t want it the other way. The way we were going in the EU would have caused us problems; it destroyed Greece, and it has destroyed jobs for the young in Spain. We needed to get out.”

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Along Pipers Way, a main artery into the Wiltshire town, where the business parks host leading tech and financial companies, BMWs and Audis slow to turn off the dual carriageway and to the north the Honda car plant spreads over 370 acres, employing 3,500 skilled staff.

The heads of these industries – from Honda itself to the tech companies – had stressed the need to stay within the EU to their staff, but employees whose livelihoods depend on living and working in the middle England town wanted out.

Even the economic wobbles and political vacuum of the last week have done little to undermine the confidence of many. “I voted out because on balance I think the EU as an organisation is really dysfunctional and it has never had any incentive to change,” said Peter Lear, arriving at the headquarters of Nationwide.

“It is no longer about free market economies, it is about a politically conjoined Europe. For me, immigration was not an issue. We have always been a country of immigration, I don’t feel too concerned about it and it wasn’t part of my thinking.”

Further down Pipers Way, at the British headquarters of US tech giant Intel, 24-year-old Thomas Duff works as a business analyst. For him, the driving factor for voting out was the need for change. “I knew it was the only way to get a significant change. I don’t think it will happen immediately, but I would expect in four to six years’ time I would expect to see some return on what we have decided. I got a lot of flak from my friends for the way I voted, but I think things are already starting to stabilise to pre-Brexit levels.”

Just six miles to the east of the sprawling town, on the housing estate of Park South, where St Johns Church looks out onto a 1960s shopping square of charity shops and a credit union, there has been plenty of change over the last few years – all of it for the worse, according to Dorothy Brown.

Brown runs The Shop, a community centre that performs multiple functions as a drop-in for young mums, a secondhand furniture store, a children’s centre, library and meeting point for those living on an estate which is as far removed from the lives of the financial workers in their BMWs as it is from the politicians squabbling in Westminster over Britain’s future.

Here, the other side of Swindon’s vote to leave Europe is a more familiar story – of a community with little or nothing to lose, and fears, real or otherwise, that east Europeans are taking their low-paid, low-skilled jobs.

The economic benefits of Swindon’s diverse business sector have not touched the lives of those living in Park South, where £20m of cuts by the Conservative local authority are being acutely felt.

“I think people were incredibly brave to vote out,” said Chris Horsell, who runs the hairdresser’s on the estate. “There is an issue with a lot of eastern bloc people coming into Swindon, and the jobs they are going for are the ones that the young in this area, who are not highly educated, are trying to get and not getting.”

Brown, who has worked in the area as a community worker for 30 years, said she has seen its decline, and the lack of any intervention to stop it.

“We are one of the very few community resources left. There is nothing going on here. They have cut everything; there are young mothers with children here, they have no support from families, there is no children’s centre, no home start, no health visitors. This was a thriving community once, it has got nothing now. I think it is really sad we have lost so much and I don’t think leaving Europe is going to change that for anyone here.”

For the young mothers chatting outside the post office, politics is dismissed as a bringer of change.

Stacey Homer, 33, and her friends Katie and Kirsty, both in their late 20s, have never voted and last week’s EU poll was no different. “The politicians are in their own little bubble, they seem to be in it for themselves,” she said. “I don’t vote because I don’t think it will make any difference to us and I also felt I just didn’t have enough information – not lies, information.

“What I am worried about is a recession, house prices, being able to afford somewhere to live. I can’t work because I can’t afford childcare. I don’t feel like anything politicians say will change anything, they are in their bubble.”

As the pantomime of Westminster political repositioning continues, they talk of husbands working in low-wage jobs who feel threatened by immigrants seeking the same low-skilled roles. “No one will talk about immigration and how it affects people,” said Katie. “Politicians, they are all the same, living in their nice, cushty houses. Voting was never going to change anything – let’s face it, we are always going to be broke.”