History
you can see
 Kingsway An
imaginary view looking towards High Street, from a series produced
during wartime by the Borough Engineer (West Glamorgan Archive
Service)
“I
have tended to write history on the basis that I have stumbled
across it while walking around Swansea. I am very interested
in the sort of history you see every day – yet do not see.
I also believe that history can reside as much in a street name
as in a familiar old building or a landmark.”
This is Richard
Porch’s agenda, and it is one that is beautifully acquitted.
It focuses on the sense of place, time and community that is
evoked by different locations in and around Swansea. Accordingly,
the approach is not chronological – or linear in any way – but
based on an A-Z of places that evoke that everyday history that
excites the author. And true to his sense of the meanings that
lie buried in street names, the book is rounded off by a section
that explores the origins of some of these names.
Porch’s
approach can be illustrated with some typical examples of his
method. There is a Victorian ice-house on the east side of the
Tawe adjacent to the Prince of Wales dock. Grade II listed, it
may soon be converted to a pub.
This fact triggers reflections
of Swansea’s maritime and industrial past that shift the
focus away from the well-known copper industry to the much less
well remembered fishing fleet. At its height in the 1870s it
employed 600 people, working the bay to land nine million oysters
a year. Over-fishing and pollution did for the Swansea Bay oyster
but by 1901 the city was one of the centres of the deep-sea fishing
industry. In the thirties, before the fleet declined, Swansea
was amongst the top-six fishing ports in Britain.
The very next
entry is on Japanese knot weed. The serendipity of Porch’s
approach is disarming. We learn something here about the genetics
of the plant before Porch offers us four recipes, including knot
weed jam and knot weed pie.
Another entry explains the Mumbles
lifeboat window at Oystermouth church. This depicts the tragedy
when all the crew were lost in April 1947 trying to rescue the
men of the SS Samtapa, a foundering Liberty ship. A few pages
on there is a section on the Mumbles Railway Electricity sub-station.
This is easily missed when one drives down Mumbles Road, but
is in fact the most substantial surviving feature of the
much-missed Mumbles Tram. Built in 1927 in the classical style,
it is now the Junction Café. An account of the building
acts as the trigger for a broader discussion of the history of
the tramway itself, which carried four million passengers as
recently as 1946, but ran for the last time in 1960.
Although
this way of writing history may seem a bit hit and miss, the
effect is actually the opposite. You might read this book through
from front to back, from A to Z. Alternatively, you might dip
into it at random, in an exploration that takes in wartime pill
boxes, a Quaker meeting house, the Empire Theatre, and a prehistoric
river bed. Whichever path you adopt, you will find that a grander
narrative of Swansea’s civic and commercial history steals
up on you. Thus an explanation for Swansea’s very imposing
head post office in Wind Street is tied to the origins of the
British postal system and to the development of Swansea’s
Victorian business life.
The discussion of street names that
closes the volume fits nicely with the gazetteer. Moreover,
the text is interpolated with well-chosen monochrome illustrations
that are effective and evocative in their own right. I especially
liked the wartime visualisations of how Swansea, hit hard by
the Luftwaffe, might be rebuilt. These include a remodelled Kingsway
and a re-engineered and straightened St Helen’s Road of
which Speer might have approved.
This is a book that like Swansea’s
history itself, is full of surprises, lovingly revealed by someone
who truly understands the city and its buildings, and adeptly
communicates this rapport to the reader.
Matthew Griffiths
05/2006
This review was first published in About
Wales, Spring 2006 |
