Up the Swansea Valley from Pontardawe
Posted on: November 13, 2011
The valley narrows the further you travel up it, and eventually starts to rise to the Brecon Beacons in Ystalyfera. In the early Nineteenth Century a man called Budd came there and built what was to become one of the biggest steelworks in the world at that time. The area where it was built was near to where your Uncle Islwyn now lives. As a matter of fact, Islwyn started his married life in a couple of rooms in the big rambling house that Budd built for himself near the works.
Steel needed coal and limestone. This brought pits and quarries to the valley and what had been, until those early Victorian days, a lovely pleasant valley quickly became filled with people from all over the country, seeking what they thought would be a better way of life for themselves and their children.
This meant that they had to be housed somehow, and quickly. Earlier a canal had been built from Ystradgynlais down to Swansea. This was before the Swansea Valley railway. This canal was at that time probably the main source of transport to the small pits and ironworks which, up the coming of Budd, sprinkled the valley. Also there was the river Tawe. Between the canal and the river in what, at that spot as I’ve already said, there was a narrow part of the valley. There was not a lot of space to build the houses needed in ever increasing numbers by the families of those who were moving into the area. The only place that they could be built was up the side of the mountain and down to the river and alongside the canal.
The houses had to be built on terraces, one above the other. Not much thought was given to drainage or water supplies. Toilets were of the crudest, or non-existent, and until standpipes were installed the source of water supply were the streams which flowed down to the river. All waste was just thrown out, and sewage just percolated down from the houses on the higher part of the mountain through to the canal, which inevitably became the breeding ground for rats.
Between the hard work, which was their lot in the steelworks and pits, and the awful living conditions, not many lived to a ripe old age. A cholera outbreak in the mid-19th Century caused a lot of deaths. I cannot write much about that I’m sorry to say, except to say that it was probably, as far as I know, the last outbreak in this country. Surprisingly many of the old cottages are still there, with proper toilets and drainage now of course, but even in my younger days, in the years between the Wars, conditions were not as good as all that.
A Swansea Valley Man 
February 6, 2015 at 11:13 am
too much to read
February 7, 2015 at 11:20 am
Well – no obligation to read it.