To the casual visitor it may seem to be a place of endless roundabouts and mundane shopping centres, hardly promising material for haunting arias. Nevertheless the hidden attractions and history of the unglamorous Wiltshire town of Swindon are to be turned into an opera.

Billed as a modern-day industrial epic, the piece, A Swindon Opera, will demonstrate through music and dance how Swindon developed into the town most people speed past on the M4. Key moments in the town's history - from when Isambard Kingdom Brunel reputedly dropped a sandwich to show where he wanted his railway works to be built, to the decline of heavy industry in the 1980s - will be represented in the hour-long work. Inspired by unusual subjects for musical theatre, such as the lives of David Blunkett and Roy Keane, arts officers came up with A Swindon Opera to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Brunel. The plan is to stage the opera using railway buildings as a backdrop. It may then go on tour. The town hopes to attract lottery money for the project.

Andrew Kelly, director of Brunel 200, which is organising the celebrations, said: "Swindon has a history of putting on working class operas and has always had thriving music societies so putting on an opera is not such an odd idea."