The making and remaking of Onllwyn: development and transformation of a former mining settlement through time

This project began in March 2022 as a piece of research to understand the development history of a former coal mining settlement, Onllwyn in the Dulais Valley.

It was commissioned by the architecture and planning firm 5^th Studio in order to contribute to the development of understandings of the landscape history of the Onllwyn area, now the focus of a large regeneration project to build a Global Centre for Rail Excellence.

A collaboration between Professor Juliet Davis, Professor Oriel Prizeman and Dr. Lui Tam, it has involved a range of different approaches to research. We have used terrestrial Laser scanning and photogrammetry techniques using a drone to create an original record of a now closed coal washery (one of the last architectural remnants of the local anthracite coal industry).

Through a combination of archival and social research methods, we have also unpacked an extraordinary development/ transformation history spanning nearly 200 years. This is a history of which relatively little trace remains within the landscape of the Upper Dulais Valley today.

Deindustrialisation since the 1960s has been accompanied by the gradual removal of evidence of the industrial past– through acts of infilling, smoothing, and re-ruralising the mining landscape and through the demolition of industrial buildings and social infrastructures within former mining communities.

Archival records held between Swansea, Cardiff, Banwen, Seven Sisters and Aberystwyth have revealed a largely vanished world – from complex labyrinths of tunnels below ground to chapels, sports pavilions, pit head baths and other lost elements of the fabric of everyday life at the surface of the landscape. The Miner's Library at the Dove workshop in Banwen and the extensive collections of the Cwm Dulais Historical Society in Seven Sisters (formed with the dedication of a lead archivist over nearly fifty years), have proved particularly valuable resources while revealing the importance of historical records of the mining past in the Dulais Valley for local people. In turn, meetings and often moving conversations with residents of the area have revealed the past as remembered, and how radical change has been experienced and felt.