Esta: Co-production, co-creation is the key to heritage now. It’s the community who’s in charge and I think that’s what’s important because heritage doesn’t matter if no one’s really going to engage with it.
Katy: What happens when you unleash the collective power of diverse communities, partners, research and creativity?
How can we unlock innovation across communities to build a stronger, fairer UK? Welcome to the Creative Communities Podcast, a series platforming extraordinary examples of research partnerships using arts, culture, and creativity to tackle the big opportunities and challenges facing our country today.
My name is Professor Katy Shaw and I’m Director of the AHRC Creative Communities programme, a national project exploring the potential of culture and cross sector co-creation to deliver inclusive innovation in the devolved contexts of our four nations. In this new series, we’ll embark on a journey across the UK. and hear from communities who are using their unique talents and expertise to take on tomorrow.
We’ll explore how creativity and cultural research can empower us to build a stronger, more resilient UK. Across the series we’ll hear five stories of change, one from each of our Community Innovation Practitioners, or CIPs for short. They’re based in Liverpool, Swansea, Glasgow, Belfast and Portrush, and they’ll show us how cultural research and development is helping to level up their communities.
Each episode is packed with local voices, practical insights and solutions that you can use to inspire and create change and co-creation in your own community.
In this episode we’re in Port Talbot in South Wales with Alex, exploring how co-creation with a diverse range of community members is breathing new life into heritage sites and rethinking the stories they tell, as well as engendering new skills and fostering a sense of belonging.
Alex: My name is Alex Langlands and I’m an Associate Professor of History and Heritage at Swansea University. And for the last twelve months, I’ve been a Community Innovation Practitioner on AHRC’s Creative Communities Programme. As an archaeologist, my passion for the past has always been stimulating. rights, physical traces in the world around us and the profoundly important role historic buildings, monuments and landscapes play as essential components in the character of the places we visit, work in, and most importantly, feel we belong in.
However, pressures on public perception capacity issues in state agencies and soaring costs are creating an ever challenging environment for our heritage assets. In this climate, how can we maintain access, arrest decay and continue to carry out routine maintenance? The answer may lie in our communities and the vibrant volunteer culture dedicated to celebrating and preserving our monuments.
In my role as a Community Innovation Practitioner, I have had the pleasure of working with communities in the borough of Neath Port Talbot, a local authority in the dramatic heart of South Wales. Our challenge, together, has been to explore how communities can work with heritage assets in more equitable forms of placemaking, to bring social, cultural and environmental benefits to the region.
In this episode of the Creative Communities Podcast, I head out on a tour of the Welsh Valleys to visit four post-industrial heritage sites to investigate how the heritage sector can better serve the needs of communities keen to preserve our assets and ask how we can unlock the power of co-creation to realise the social, cultural and economic value of our rich industrial heritage.
My first stop is Craig Gwladus Country Park, once the site of a coal mine, but now a naturally wooded hill slope looking down on the Neath Valley. Since the decline of the colliery, the land has been given over to forestry, but an infestation of Phytophthora, a fungus that affects the roots of trees, meant that, for health and safety reasons, much of the hillside required felling.
This drastically altered the landscape. The scene of devastation brought together a group of volunteers keen to improve access and plant replacement deciduous native trees to regenerate the hillside. The group became formalised as the Friends of Craig Gwladus Country Park and I’d arranged to meet with Diane Davis, chair and co-founder, early on a Friday morning.
During some vegetation management up at the mouth of the Cap Driftmine entrance, the volunteer group had come across ruined walls and, as an archaeologist, I’d offered to take a look. The site was at the very top of the coal workings and as I make my way up past the vestiges of the industry, I’m reminded both of just how steep the climb is and how much I’m in need of a fitness workout.
Climbing up now. Quite high. Right, now I’m out on a pretty well-made path here. Good surface. It’s on the line of the old tram road that used to run along the hillside. delivering the coal from the drift mines ultimately to an incline railway that took it down to the canals and the canal would take it down to the docks at Swansea and then that in turn would be taken to all over the UK and all around the world.
So here I am climbing up alongside the engine house which is almost dug into the side of the hill here. As I stop to catch my breath and look out over the scene, one of the park’s most frequent visitors, Hugo, a friendly spaniel poodle cross, came over to say hello.
Hello, you. This could mean only one thing. Diane was close at hand. Hello. How are you, alright?
Diane starts to tell me about the moment they discovered the ruins.
Diane: So, this was all covered in, well, bramble and whatever, and this old chap said, Oh, there used to be a building there. Well, I’ve never seen evidence of a building, but anyway, when we cleared it, I don’t know what it would have been or anything. There’s like a, something there, and there’s like a structure here which goes all the way along, look.
Alex: We examined some of the ruins in a bit more detail, before making our way back to the park HQ for a cup of tea and a natter. I asked Diane what the early ambitions of the Friends of Craig Gwladus Country Park were.
Diane: Our initial aim in the beginning was just to restore the paths because it was well used for dog walkers and whatever and that’s how we started the group really was to get the paths back and get some of the trees planted.
Alex: And what sort of challenges have there been then over the course of like, I guess, about ten years, is it?
Diane: It’s probably a bit more than that now, if I think back. I think it’s more than ten years. I mean, initially it was like funding, because we didn’t have any funds, and we, we did, used to run our own little charity events to try and raise money, like curry nights and things like that, for us to be able to purchase some tools.
But obviously, since we’ve been able to access funding from places like Pen Y Cymru and the Lottery Heritage Grants and things like that it’s allowed us to expand our aims and ideas for the park, which is what we have done. And it’s become something more than we ever dreamed of, really.
Alex: You say you’ve got dog walkers and walkers passing through, but what groups are now using the path?
Diane: Well now it’s well used with all sorts of groups. I mean, Coy Cleyol is one that certainly springs to mind, and they run a lot of courses up here, but we have a number of courses, like what I would call wellness courses for young children, autistic children, for adults with learning difficulties.
So recently now that Coy Cleyol are trying to look at improving the disability access of the site, which we think would be a good thing. And we’ve run events here, a number of events the charcoal burning, and we did all sorts of woodworking events, which have all been highly successful.
What concerns me is that we’re a fairly aged group and it would be nice if we could get a few more youngsters to, to continue with this work and I just think with we have two local comprehensive schools on our doorstep, whether it would be, there’s some way that we could try and encourage them to come up on courses and, and to learn some of the skills needed.
Alex: No, indeed, but it’s certainly something to put on the list of to dos. There are what we would call heritage assets in the park. Have they been a part of the way you’ve thought about presenting the park and having people engage with the park?
Diane: Most certainly, I think we’ve all been totally surprised at how much heritage was here.
I mean, I think we were all aware that there’d been some coal mining, but a couple of members of our group are quite interested in that, and, we have now recently explored some of the heritage sites that are left here, and, personally, I find it absolutely fascinating and so I think that is an area that we’d like to expand on and we do have a group from Neath College that come along and, have been learning to do excavation and, mortaring skills and whatever, which is brilliant. And again, it’s something again I’d like to see more of, the heritage side of it, I think has been a real plus bit for the park.
Alex: As we finish up our chat more volunteers from the volunteer group began to assemble for their day’s work. Here, I find Lisa Kirman, part time manager at Craig Gwladus Country Park.
Partly funded by the local authority, Lisa is the person who is probably most responsible for unlocking the power of the park and the army of volunteers who are so passionate about its maintenance. She’s been working for over seven years with the friends and was initially a woodland officer brought in at the point the park was threatened with closure.
She began by getting in small grants and has moved on to successively bigger funding streams. Her role mainly involves logistics, improving the park for visitors and looking at ways to sustain it going forward. I ask her about the unprecedented cuts to local authority budgets and the importance of ring-fencing funds to support vital volunteer engagement.
Lisa: To me it seems an absolute no brainer, knowing what we know now from working with the volunteers on site here. From the five years from when I started working with the friends, during that time when we had a ranger working on site one day a week, who was there to just support the friends, coordinate the, whatever maintenance activity they were doing that week, and actually have a plan.
We recorded the volunteer hours from that first year. But from that small amount of investment, one day a week, we’ve gone from, I think it was something like, possibly five hundred hours a year of volunteer investment, well we’ve just recorded the last year, and this is purely as a result of the support that the friends are getting in terms of that time invested in coordinating the group, encouraging people, giving them the right training, that kind of thing. It was, the last year was two thousand hours over the year.
So, financially, when you think of the amount of effort that’s gone into keeping these parts clear, and all the rest of it would have had to be done by somebody’s paid contractors.
Alex: Yep.
Lisa: It’s the amount that is saving the council by that small bit of seed investment to unlock that time. If the same could be done through other services and things, the amount of money that could be saved. I mean it isn’t just about money, it’s about people learning skills.
There’s so much added value that isn’t financial. But when you look at that small investment as if that financial gain isn’t enough, you get all these added benefits of giving that support to volunteers.
Alex: So what do you see then are the challenges, not just for the park going forward, but for the authority and its heritage assets going forward?
Lisa: I think the big thing with this part, any site, but, but I guess you could apply it more broadly, is having a vision that is created with local people and not rushing that vision with the friend’s group here. It’s like, okay, let’s just do a little thing and just suss out who’s interested in this place.
And yes, they are tick, not try and anticipate where the bus is going. Give that ability to let the bus go the right way in the long run for the people that are on it.
Alex: And this is wonderful, we’ve just arrived now, a new site here, a new heritage asset in the park.
Lisa: Yeah, that nobody knew was here until John turned up.
Alex: Right.
Lisa: John being the great grandson of a chap that worked here in the eighteen hundreds. So, we don’t actually know what this is, but it’s definitely related to the main drift, which is apparently called The Bully, which I’ve learnt.
Alex: So that’s the main entrance to the drift mine, The Bully.
Lisa: Yep, yep. This had a wheel sat on it, or some form of winding gear. So the main steam engine would have been on the engine house, obviously. And then there would have been, what was the side jam?
Alex: This latest archaeological find in Craig Gwladus Country Park has done much to enthuse the Friends Group in their ongoing work to better understand the coal mining heritage of the area.
They are formulating plans to bring in some professional archaeologists to do a community dig and to use this as a way of recruiting new and hopefully younger members. In part, their interest has been inspired by activity going on elsewhere in the park, on the site of what was once the mine’s blacksmith shop.
The ruins of that were uncovered in a community excavation a few years back, and are now undergoing a transformation, as a group of students from the local college set about stabilising the walls and making it more accessible for people visiting the park. As a community innovation practitioner, I had been enabled to work as part of the team, to bring my specialisms to the table, but also to learn, by being at the so-called coalface, what the values and ambitions of the group were.
This was something that I could not have done without funding through the AHRC’s Creative Communities Programme. I loved getting my hands dirty, and we worked together to clear back the walls, record the archaeological remains, and to sort the loose stone and bricks into piles, so that they could be used in the new year as part of the planned restoration.
So I head over to the smoothing site, a veritable hive of activity, and went over to chat to Kieran Locke. Known as Paddy to his mates, and Iaaen Humphreys, a tutor on the construction course at Neath Port Talbot Group of Colleges. So what are you doing here then Paddy?
Paddy: I’m just clearing all away, all the old mortar. So I can add on some new bricks, and, get it back up to height.
Alex: And is this a skill you’ve been doing on the course before?
Paddy: Yeah, I’ve done a little bit of it on some other walls. But I normally don’t have patience for chiselling, but to be honest, I quite like it.
Alex: I mean, you guys have achieved an amazing amount since I was last here in December. How do you feel about the work you’ve been doing?
Paddy: Nice and fast. We work a quite good space as well.
Alex: There we go.
Paddy: Nice. There we go. Out of there.
Alex: That’s a big root that you’ve just pulled out there.
Paddy: Oh yes.
Iaaen: That’s very good. Gonna salvage all this water now.
Paddy: And then we can build all of our back up to height.
Community Voices: Yeah. Hey
Iaaen: Tom. How’s your route? There we go.
Alex: It was great to see their enthusiasm for working on historic buildings. But I wanted to know whether this experience was useful for students looking to go into the wider construction industry. I asked Iaaen about how the lads were responding to the work.
Iaaen: We haven’t had experience like this since it started. Actually, well, I know Covid has ruined a lot of things, but boys don’t really do site visits anymore either. Not to see just a normal building site, just to get that experience. So this is a good experience having stuff like this.
Alex: And, what level are these guys at right now?
Iaaen: These are level one, multi trained students.
Alex: Multi trained, that’s an NVQ, isn’t it?
Iaaen: That’s just a diploma.
Alex: Okay, so really, it’s entry level.
Iaaen: Entry level. Yeah. So, the NVQN is the apprentices. Hopefully they will go on to be apprentices in something.
Alex: I turned to Paddy to ask him how he thought the skills he was learning here would prepare him for the world of work.
Paddy: Paddy’s idea of work is don’t be on the dole kids. Get a job so you can actually do things you want in life.
Alex: Yeah, that’s the one. So, you Paddy, you’ve been here now for, since the beginning of the academic year. Do you think this is something you’d like to go into? Working with stone?
Paddy: To be honest, I do think it’s a good experience to work with stone. You do also get to work with brickwork as well. Which, like, I find amazing that we have to like, excavate, get the stone, find all the perfect pieces. It’s like a big puzzle, really. So you have to find the perfect pieces to fit in, and then you’ve got a banging wall.
Alex: Yeah. It was clear that this line of work was challenging Paddy in a way that regular brickwork and blockwork weren’t. And as the day wore on, I was struck by his engagement with the traditional stone of the region and the craft like practices required to lay it properly using traditional lime mortar.
Overall, I was taken aback not just by the amount of work they had done since I’d been on site helping with the archaeology, but in the transformation in the students themselves. When they had first come here to the Smithy site, they’d been largely disinterested and tricky to get going, yet, as the work progressed, so too had their confidence and their sense of stewardship over the wider site.
When we started, it was challenging to get them to see the day out. Now they’re so enthused by their workmanship that we have our job cut out getting them to finish up in time for the bus back to their college. As we walk back along the old tram road to the Craig Gwladus Country Park HQ, I asked Tom Kinghorn Evans, a master stonemason and conservation builder, what are the benefits of having the students here for college level training.
Tom: It’s really important for them to be able to work on these buildings and to have experience working on these buildings because without that I can’t see how these buildings are going to survive into the future because you need a workforce, you need enough people in the area to understand how these buildings were built and the best way to conserve them and repair them otherwise we’re just going to carry on with a whole host of inappropriate repairs yeah and the significance of these buildings is going to be lost very soon.
Alex: Yeah and so if we lose these buildings we lose that character of place. And when we’re increasingly being told into the place-based studies, that historic character and heritage is essential to how we define place. We’ve got to think about how we make these buildings sustainable, haven’t we?
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. What I think is great about what we’re doing here is that they’ve sort of been given a, a free reign. I mean, whilst the, the quality of the end product is important to us.
Alex: Yeah.
Tom: They’ve been given the opportunity to learn and to just have a go, really, which I think is one of the most important things. I don’t think these kids would have had the opportunity to work on a traditionally built building without us.
And it can be quite daunting. I think when the kids first started working, they were thrown by the difference in technique and approach needed. So when they’re being asked to work up from walls that aren’t necessarily plumb and true and surfaces are uneven and you’re having to pull out ivory roots before you start work.
Alex: Yeah.
Tom: It can be daunting and a little bit soul destroying because there’s so much preparation work needed for starting. But now weeks into the project, when they arrive and they actually can see how much has been done since they started, and the sort of, the high quality of the work as well. Yeah. They’re actually coming in proud of what they were doing the week before.
Alex: It seemed to me that the creative community in Craig Gwladus Country Park was fixing a number of issues. This wasn’t just about training and using local materials, nor was it just about conserving the character of place and restoring the region’s heritage assets.
As Tom so eloquently put it, it was also about building confidence and a sense of self in young lads. And this is in an area where ambition and opportunity were often in short supply. There is no doubt that Craig Gwladus Country Park should be considered a success story in terms of the level of community interaction, the volunteer hours donated, and the enhancement of the visitor experience.
There wasn’t a time when I visited the park that I didn’t see it being used by walkers or by groups of practitioners engaged in crafts for wellbeing, social cohesion, and confidence building. What our creative community had achieved here demonstrated very clearly how a small amount of investment could unlock a wider community of different interests and passions to take stewardship of their environment and their heritage assets.
Whilst not without its challenges, what was happening at Craig Gwladus was a potential model for how other sites could operate, largely under the stewardship of local communities. But I was aware from engaging with heritage sites across the region that a range of other issues, ones not experienced at the park, could present challenges tricky for volunteers to overcome on their own.
So I set out down the valley to meet up with other community members and heritage practitioners to find out more about the range of hurdles being faced elsewhere by volunteers from other heritage sites. who were keen to make the most of their local assets. My next stop was the Neath Abbey Ironworks, just three miles from Craig Gwladus to meet members of their friends’ group. But standing between me and them was a treasure trove of rich industrial heritage that’s been taken over by vegetation and a huge and very loud waterfall.
Just coming up to the edge of the precipice here of the waterfall. There really is a huge amount of water there tumbling down into the pool below. So much power in that water. And if I make my way to the edge of the cliff face, I am looking down upon a veritable wildlife haven. But this is actually anything but a natural wonderland. This is almost entirely human made, this environment because the cliff edge that I’m standing on here, this came about as a cutting back.
It’s a source building stone for local construction, perhaps as early as the medieval period. And as a consequence, the waterfall that was created has been used for milling power. And if I was stood here back in the middle of the nineteenth century, there wouldn’t be any trees here. I’d be able to see buildings, chimneys, workshops, all sorts of stuff going on here.
It’s a really, really busy place. And I’m making my way down the valley. I’m going to pass underneath Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway, there’s a fantastic viaduct and as I do so on the other side I’ll see the majestic furnaces of the Neath Abbey Ironworks, a site of national if not international significance and I’m meeting Catherine and Peter Richards there, two members of the Friends of Neath Abbey Ironworks who over the years have worked tirelessly to maintain that site to keep it open, to keep access open so that people can enjoy the rich heritage of this valley.
My community innovation practitioner role had enabled me to develop my engagement with this group, to look over a conservation management plan the head commissioned and to explore how it could be set in its wider context by incorporating other industrial heritage sites up the valley.
I found Peter and Cath sitting at a picnic table next to the rushing waters of the Clydach stream and began by asking Cath how she got involved.
Catherine: Because I was coming up to retirement, and this was really a very attractive place to volunteer on, and it was a very friendly place of volunteers, and there was a good age balance here, and we had refreshments every Sunday, so we had the volunteer, but we also had the social aspect of volunteering.
Alex: So a sense of community, has immersed out of this set of monuments.
Catherine: Yes, it has actually. We’ve had people, quite a few of our youngsters’ won prizes, but we had other volunteers who studied ecology and mathematics in the university, so it really developed young people as well as helping the older people as well, given the social point of view.
Alex: And give me a sense of how important this monument is to the story of Wales and the world.
Peter: Well, it’s eight thousand plans are preserved in the West Glamorgan Archives. And the importance of these plans is illustrated in the fact that they are registered on the UNESCO Memory of the World site. They are there with the death warrant of Charles I, Magna Carta, and the Bill of Rights.
That shows the importance of the site by reason of its plans. And these plans show of this site spread technology of the nineteenth century steam technology to Wales, Britain, and the rest of the world. It spread the Industrial Revolution to places as far apart as Australia, India, South America, and most of Europe.
Alex: So we’ve got a site here of international significance.
Peter: Yes.
Alex: And these huge furnaces that we see here, See here. I mean, they are majestic. They really are remarkable survival from that period, aren’t they?
Peter: They are. They are some of the best surviving examples of the eighteenth-century masonry built furnaces, and they virtually intact furnace. Number two has got his lightning in and part of the last charge is still in there. So he could almost be used again. It’s that good condition.
Alex: So there’s been lots of successes, but of course you’ve got ongoing challenges with a monument of this complexity.
Peter: Yes, you could say that. It’s not in good condition, and it’s unsafe at present.
Alex: I mean, we can see here, there’s really fantastic furnaces here, but the tops of them are, obviously, there are issues there. You’ve got vegetation growing in them. Where are you at as a group in terms of your access to the site?
Peter: Well, we aren’t allowed to access the site at present because we haven’t got insurance. The Friends, we have, we raised funds for a structural survey. And that’s been completed, and that highlighted the problems, that was about five years ago, but nothing has been done since.
Alex: So, I know Neath Port Talbot is in, going to be in receipt of National Rotary Heritage funding, and there are funds. To structural funds, to work with heritage in the area, but would it be fair to say, and that’s what’s too sensationalist, to say that actually this monument currently is going backwards?
Peter: I think it’s going backwards at present, yes. It is deteriorating.
Alex: The international significance of the Neath Abbey Ironworks is recognised by the status assigned to it by CADU, the statutory body in Wales responsible for the protection of the nation’s heritage. It is designated what is called a Scheduled Ancient Monument and, as such, it enjoys the same level of protection as sites like Stonehenge and Caernarfon Castle.
But this can, in some ways, become both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it will be protected forevermore, but a curse because the highest level of professional engagement is required in the maintenance and development of the site. The designation therefore comes with a price tag and in a world of diminishing resources and rising costs, the ongoing maintenance was going to present its owners, the local authority, with a rising challenge.
Peter and Cath are therefore vital assets in the process by which the day-to-day tidying, cleaning and reporting on issues keep this monument open and accessible. But community stewardship of industrial heritage sites isn’t just about maintenance. A fundamental part of any industrial heritage asset is the way in which it is interpreted and understood.
Here, the Friends of Neath Abbey Ironworks have themselves produced an excellent range of information panels. Backed up by rigorous research, these panels are essential in telling the detailed story of the site and its contribution to wider narratives about Wales and its industrial past. And those narratives are changing.
In the same way that such sites need to adapt to the ever changing financial and environmental climate, there is also a need to respond to cultural changes. New tellings of old histories are required to ensure diversity and inclusivity in interpretive frameworks that recognise the full impacts of our rich industrial past.
I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with Peter on more explorations of the valley and its links to the Industrial Revolution. And in our endeavours, we have discovered new copper working sites in the valley that may very well have a darker history. So, as a community innovation practitioner, self-charged with examining more equitable ways of engaging with our industrial heritage, I wanted to explore some of these issues to see how they might inform future practice.
To do so, I move on from the Neath Valley down to the lower Swansea Valley to the site of another nascent heritage park, the White Rock Copperworks. Here, only the ruins of an eighteenth-century copperworking site remain, alongside the banks of the gently flowing River Towy. Like the Neath Abbey Ironworks, these ruins are designated Scheduled Ancient Monuments.
They are sites of national significance. And since the nineteen eighties, they have provided the setting for a wonderful re- greening project with its own band of volunteers working tirelessly to keep the vegetation managed to allow access, clean up litter and promote its historic importance.
But it was Phil Okwedy, a professional storyteller, who I had met at an event a few years ago that I wanted to chat to.
Phil had inspired me with a story he had woven through the contested narrative of copper and an enchanting journey through Africa. And back then, I’d promised to show him around the copperworks of Swansea to explore that African connection in more depth.
Phil: Ah, well my name’s Phil Okwedy and I’m a storyteller.
So I tell folk tales, fairy tales, myths, oral, oral stories from that tradition. And my background, my mother was from Cardiff. And my father was actually an Igbo from Southeast Nigeria. Now, the Igbo are the people who, in the nineteen sixties, seceded away from the brand-new Nigerian federation and formed the country Biafra.
And so their experience was the Biafran war, which was pretty awful. So that’s, that’s my background, though I was fostered long term. So I lived with a long term foster mother down in South Pembrokeshire, who actually was my mother. So all intents and purposes. Right. And so, yeah, I grew up with her.
Alex: Yeah. It’s interesting you mentioned Biafra because that was one of the really important places in terms of the slave trade. And the commodities that were coming out of South Wales were being used directly to trade with people in Biafra, for other human beings.
Phil: Yeah, the Bight of Biafra. Yeah, it’s a very complicated history, I think, and complex history.
Yeah. I think I probably grew up like a lot of people just thinking, that Europeans went to West Africa and stole people, but actually they bought people with those manilas. Yeah. And somebody had to sell them. Yeah. Somebody in West Africa had to be involved in that trade too. So, I don’t think it was that simple.
Alex: You’ve mentioned the Manillas. I’ve actually got here somewhere about my person. Here we go, look, I’ve got a picture of one here. This one, I don’t, this one isn’t from, uh, Swansea, it’s from Bristol, but it’s part of that trade.
Phil: Yeah, if you think of it as a, almost like a bangle. It’s a rod of, is this copper or brass?
Alex: I think that one’s copper, I think, yeah.
Phil: Probably copper. And then you bend it around your wrist, and the ends are flattened and widened. Yeah. So they’re quite decorative. Yeah, they are decorative, and I believe that although they were copper and brass, but they also had ivory.
The ones, it was obviously a thing that was highly valued in West Africa, but had absolutely no other purpose than being used for the slave trade as…
Alex: As a form of currency.
Phil: That’s the word I was looking for.
Alex: I mean, rather than in coin, you’re basically, you’re paying in these bracelets.
Phil: Which were made somewhere near where we’re standing.
Alex: Yeah. I mean, this, what’s interesting about the white rock copper works, where we are, which now, I mean, apart from the quay that we can see here and a few old walls, ruined walls. We can start walking up to these ones here, actually. It’s been regreened, isn’t it? But this is one of the places where we have a, a drawing from 1744, which records the location of a manilla house, which it’s not clear now exactly where that was.
But it’s basically telling us that at this copperworks, they were engaged in the production of this currency, currency directly related to the slave trade.
Phil: Absolutely. Had actually no other function and no other value.
Alex: And this whole site now, I mean, some of it’s been left in ruin and it’s, I mean, it’s quite nice. It’s quite attractive to see it going back to nature in some senses. But there are other parts as we’ve seen over there, the redevelopment of some of the copper works. It’s being termed a heritage led regeneration. Do you think there are risks around using the copper industry to sort of redevelop and celebrate place?
Phil: If that history that we’ve just been talking about remains hidden, yes. I mean, I think we’ve come here, and we’re wandering around today. I have seen nothing that actually explains why we’re walking around at all. Whether that’s to celebrate the copper industry or not, and certainly nothing that links it to that triangular trade. And how important, just how important it was. So, I mean, I would like to see it acknowledged. In that way.
Alex: At what point do you think we need to start thinking about the true significance of the industrial revolution in particular the copper industry.
Phil: I’d have been very happy if the planning was going in for that development that highlighting the importance of the copper industry and its links to that past to everybody’s past really, we live in a post-industrial Britain and most of the fabric of it that we see the built fabric of it wouldn’t be here if it if it wasn’t for industrialisation, which was driven by the slave trade.
Alex: Yeah I think I asked Phil about his craft and the role that storytelling can play in helping us find new ways of narrating our complex history.
Phil: My personal way of doing that is often I will find folktales and I will weave some personal history or some history into it because for me, the stories resonate even more then.
Alex: Yeah, so we need to move forward and work in these narratives into the narrative here of the Lower Swansea Valley.
Phil: Yeah, and into Swansea’s story. Lots of people have heard of Copperopolis. But, yeah, I think if you just say Manilla, most people wouldn’t know what a Manilla was. And given that they were of such huge importance, that seems extraordinary, really. It does, doesn’t it? It does. It’s a real
Alex: It does, doesn’t it? It does. It’s a real black spot.
Phil: Yeah, Bermuda Triangle.
Alex: Well, thanks ever so much, Phil, for coming down and joining me here on this site. You’ve brought the sunshine with you. Let’s carry on having a wander around and see if we can find the old workhouse.
Phil: Yeah, well of course it is lovely because, it’s always beautiful in Swansea.
Alex: Yeah!
Phil’s perspective on these issues is thoughtful and passionate. It chimed with contemporary scholarship here in Wales that is now positioning the transatlantic slave trade and all the financial benefits that came with it. much more centrally to industrial developments in the British Isles and the rise in wealth and inequality more broadly across the empire.
It is clear that we cannot neatly disentangle the slave trade from the industrial heritage of South Wales and that we must think of new and creative ways to engage with this contested past so that collectively we arrive at interpretations that are inclusive and representative of the broadest possible community.
But there are other ways, too, in which narratives can change. As generation after generation drift further from past industries, the need to both remember and to forget is ever present. I knew that I needed to talk to someone young, from the area, and with a passion for heritage. That person was Esta Lewis, a recent graduate from Swansea University, and someone with their foot firmly on the first rung of the professional heritage ladder.
I’d first met Esta up at Craig Gwladus Country Park, and in a discussion about the coal mining related heritage assets in the park, I’d been struck by what she’d had to say about the legacy of the coal industry more generally in South Wales. Esta grew up in the valleys, and her interest in the past had led her to a degree in history.
She was the first from her family to go on to higher education, and through a work placement with a local museum, her passion for heritage was born. I wanted to explore another ex-colliery site and she recommended Park Slip Colliery at Aberkenfig, now a nature reserve with public access, where a series of poignant sculptures were all that remained of the past industrial landscape.
Equipped with a leaflet of the park’s sculpture trail, we set out to explore on a wet and windy afternoon. So this is the first sculpture here.
Esta: So we’ve got our father and son. So if your dad was a miner, then if you were a boy, you would probably be a miner. You’re a father, his son, work to work for the first time. Lamp in hand and Tommy box in the pockets. Children were employed to open and close doors, which controlled mine ventilation to allow drams to pass through. So that’s the story.
Alex: Yeah.
Esta: That I heard so many times off my grandfather himself of when he first went to work in a coal mine. Him and most of his brothers, bar one who went into the war, worked in the colliery. So, they would have walked like that together.
Alex: Father and son, yeah.
Esta: Fourteen at the time as well.
Alex: Goodness me.
Esta: As a child, you just, yeah.
Alex: And the sculpture here is obviously carved in wood and it’s been blackened up a bit. Yeah. They do have quite miserable faces, don’t they? I
Esta: I think the truth was that they never really wanted their children to go to the mine. I think it was more that’s what they had to do. It was big families. They had no other income. They needed that money to feed their mouth.
Alex: And you’ve brought me here today to Park Slip, which when you said this is a ex colliery, I had visions of turning up here and seeing headgear and the remnants of a colliery, but if anything, I’m looking out on this beautiful, wonderful wetland environment.
Esta: Yeah, and it’s quite common now. There’s a lot of areas in Wales that were old collieries. They’ve had, like, re greening, or have been turned into, like, country parks, or, this is a nature reserve now. So you can’t really notice, like anyone here today that would know, you would never think this was an ex colony. There’s nothing here to remind you of that.
Alex: I guess it’s how we choose to remember in these locations.
Esta: Yes. That’s the problem, I think, with heritage. It’s always changing. I think we’ve always got the issue of linking heritage to history, but it’s not. Heritage is constantly happening. It’s evolving. So this is all part of the heritage. There’s an environmental heritage here now, as well as that industrial heritage. We create a new heritage all the time. The time and it’s evolving, and it’s not stagnant.
Alex: Wonderful. Well, shall we move on and see if we can find another sculpture?
I’d wanted to wrap up my episode of the Creative Communities podcast with an authoritative voice from the heritage sector, maybe a minister or a big cheese from the statutory bodies.
It would have been an interview that set out the challenges but struck a positive upbeat note on the huge potential heritage has for healthier and happier communities in South Wales. But I’m going to return to Esta, because as we work our way back to the visitor centre, she spoke with a passion for what she thought the future could be, and a chance encounter with a group of visitors to Park Slip served as a perfect illustration of how this complex past can have a positive future. I asked her what she thought the main risks to industrial heritage were.
Esta: There’s real danger that we get fixated, and I think we have been fixated, on our mining past. And, there’s a place for it, and it is really important. But, it doesn’t represent everyone else’s story. Yeah, it’s a part of mine, but a very small part.
And that’s coming from someone who’s so proud of what my grandfather did. People did more things than people did. Just mining. Typically, the valleys, because of industry, we’ve had so much migration in and out of the areas. And I think it’s really important we capture those stories as well. To give a whole rounded viewpoint.
Otherwise, there is that worry that people just think all we did was mine or that’s all we can do. There’s nothing for us anymore. Whereas if we focus on all of our heritage, people can see that we can still thrive in the valleys, we’re not, the land time forgot, we’re still, really vibrant, we’re still evolving, we are doing things, and I think that’s really important.
Alex: And I think it’s a sense of community as well, I mean, that’s one of the things that’s taken me back is that really strong sense of bonded communities when I got in the valleys and talked to people.
Esta: That’s one of the things, so it’s important that the UK government and subsequently the Welsh government are signing up to the intangible cultural heritage. With UNESCO and part of that I think we should capture is the community, you know, it’s not a physical heritage that we can find.
Alex: Yeah.
Esta: But it is an important aspect, I had aunties that weren’t aunties and, you walked in people’s houses and that’s part of that culture then, of how you grow up.
Alex: Yeah, and here we go, we’ve got a community here of young children all tearing around on the, on the nature trail.
Esta: It’s always good to see.
Alex: Yeah, it is wonderful, wonderful to see. And because it gives a sense of purpose to the old colliery lands, isn’t it? Yes. Otherwise, you’d be quite difficult to do much on this land, wouldn’t it?
Esta: Yeah, and that’s why it’s important of looking at different ways. to interpret our heritage or use it in, um, the future. If it was just left as a colliery site it’d be abandoned.
Alex: Yeah, one person may be not quite enjoying the nature trail as much as the rest of the gang here.
Esta: Maybe not ask for his feedback.
But yeah, I think changing how heritage is now used and interpreted means more audiences will engage with it. And I think that’s what’s important because heritage doesn’t matter if no one’s really going to engage with it. That’s why repurposing uses, it’s quite common to conserve a building and use it into a different, put it into a different use now. And I think we can look at that as well with actual physical landscapes as well.
Alex: What role do you think communities have to play in some of that?
Esta: I think it’s really important you’ve got community buy in. The communities is what’s going to help move that forward. You need their opinion; you need to understand.
Because it’s all well and good, we’re professionals. Saying, this is what we should do and this is what we’re going to do. But what’s the point if that community doesn’t care about it or it doesn’t link to them or doesn’t mean anything to them. You need to get them involved. So, co-production and co-creation is the key to heritage now.
We can’t be having this hierarchical structure of us coming in, doing it to them. It needs to be the community telling us what to do, and flipping those power structures, you know, on their head. It’s the community that was in charge and we’re just the facilitators of that.
Alex: Esta brought me back to where I started, the value of co-creation and the need for collaborative partnerships in delivering impactful change. For me, this cut to the heart of what I’d discovered as a community innovation practitioner, funded through the AHRC’s Creative Communities Programme and charged with exploring the role of heritage and communities in placemaking endeavours.
What I’d found, in the case of Craig Gwladus, is that yes, the park and its heritage assets were in better shape as a green space amenity for the enjoyment of a wider public. But by putting communities at the heart of that process, they’ve become a meaningful place, where members young and old stay active, meet new people, develop skills and tell new stories through active participation. But the three-fold benefit came in the development of much needed skills locally for other such buildings and in the growing confidence of young lads working in thought provoking craft conservation practices and the connection they now felt with that place through their meaningful engagement with it.
As a Community Innovation Practitioner, I’ve been the beneficiary of research conversations that have brought to the fore the need to acknowledge that, unlike the structures, the narratives we weave around them cannot simply be set in stone. What is clear from exploring the industrial heritage of the region is that the stories we tell of these sites need to be ever evolving, to engage new audiences and reflect changing perceptions about the legacies of our past.
We need to do this so that we can build on what we’ve learned. better reconcile ourselves with historic global inequalities and develop a more socially cohesive shared story. It is abundantly clear that engagement with heritage has the capacity to deliver across a range of societal needs. And yet currently, state sanctioned heritage privileges management, monitoring and conservation principles in discourses that see community engagement only as an add on.
But as Esta pointed out, heritage doesn’t matter if no one’s really going to engage with it. Framework for how we place value in the heritage landscape is no longer tenable. How public funding is directed towards heritage related activity needs a drastic rethink. I’ve seen clearly that co-created research that places community-based participatory engagement at its very heart is the way forward.
Katy: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Creative Communities Podcast.
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Join us for the next episode when we’ll be in Portrush, Northern Ireland with Jim. Exploring creative co-production and relationships between skateboarders and videographers. They’re using their creativity to document their community and influence their surroundings.
Episode preview: This whole research project would actually give us responsibility to actually do this.
It’s put Portrush as a skating destination on the map a lot more. I suppose it’s helped to take us more seriously as users of public space. You’ve provided us with a lot of energy. You’ve provided us almost with a bit of validity. You’re coming from an academic perspective. That’s fresh for us. There’s a lot of people that I grew up skating with that were not only my peers, but people that I looked up to and they’ve been amazed at what we’ve done.
Katy: Happy listening!
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