Links

Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments web site

Also from the Commission, Richard Suggett's study of Radnorshire vernacular: Houses and history in the march of Wales link

Copperopolis

The Tipping Staithes at Foxhole (Glynn Vivian Art Gallery)

Stephen Hughes, Copperopolis: landscapes of the early industrial period in Swansea (Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales, 2000, repr. 2005. Pp. 358, illus., colour. ISBN 1-871184-27-4; £19.99.

This is a very welcome reprint of the most exhaustive study of an industrial landscape in Wales, based on extensive survey work in advance of modern Swansea’s development. The expansion of the city has seen the obliteration of most of the industrial archaeology of the area. But this was the earliest industrial landscape in Wales, originating in the seventeenth century – a key focus of the first Industrial Revolution. Hughes lovingly investigates and documents the development of industry in the lower Swansea valley – not just copper, albeit that by 1850 Swansea was producing some 29,000 tonnes of refined copper – but also coal, tinplate, alum, fire-clay, arsenic, lead, zinc and (primarily earthenware) pottery.
     Each industry’s origin and development is meticulously analysed, with the primary focus on the copper enterprises and their associated patterns of transport and power – coal roads, canals and waterways, turnpikes, wagon and horse-drawn rail – the navigable river Tawe and its relationship to the south Wales coal field providing the original lift-off for Swansea’s metallurgical industries.
     This is not simply a study in industrial archaeology; rather, Hughes imaginatively connects the archaeology of industry with the social history of masters and men, and the development of urbanisation. He shows, for instance, that the Swansea area “provided a natural training school in which local artisans were able to develop into innovative engineers” – men who need recognition alongside the traditional “heroes” of the Industrial Revolution. Thus he contributes biographies of men such as William Edwards (1719-89), architect, bridge-builder and nonconformist minister who built the arched iron bridge at Pontypridd, and was commissioned by Robert Morris to build the Beaufort Bridge and Forest Copper and Lead Works (1747-52); and he goes on to examine the copper masters themselves, the settlements they created for their workers, and how these evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
      The book represents the most sophisticated discussion of Welsh urban settlement that I know, considering layout, housing design and construction, water supply and sewerage, as well as issues such as workers’ rents. We get a detailed examination of the planned towns of Morriston and Trevivian – where copper masters provided homes, churches, schools and markets for the families who depended on them – as well as the lesser examples of Landore, Foxhole and Grenfelltown. Comparisons are drawn with workers settlements not only in Britain (Saltaire, for instance) but Europe (Belgian coalfield settlements, Colonia Güell near Barcelona – where Gaudi began a church).
      Equal care is lavished on documenting the mansions of the industrialists, with attention both to architectural detail and the landscape impact of these great houses and associated parkland (Sketty, Singleton, Clyne...). A full chapter is devoted to the social institutions of the copper townships – schools, churches and chapels principally – considered in both social terms and in relation to architectural history. This means that the book represents a major study in church and chapel design, considering, amongst other humbler examples, the “cathedral of Welsh nonconformity” – Tabernacle, Morriston. Finally, there is a special case-study of Landore – perhaps the most densely developed industrial landscape in the lower Swansea Valley, lying between Swansea itself and Morriston. This poisoned land, the heart of what was once “the largest tract or derelict land in Europe”, through which the trains from Paddington and Cardiff General approached Swansea town, has now seemingly disappeared but Hughes records 73 locations where relict industrial features survive. The book as a whole is a magnificent attempt to recover a lost world and its society, at the same time as it documents forty years of changing understandings of the significance of industrial remains.

Matthew Griffiths

14 November 2005