Where tourists seldom tread, part 8: five more towns with hidden treasures

26.02.2024 - 12:06 / theguardian.com / Henry Viii VIII (Viii)

Port Talbot recently returned to the spotlight, when Tata Steel announced electrification and layoffs last month and the BBC broadcast Michael Sheen’s television series The Way this week. Politicians and foreign companies can shut down entire towns with impressive equanimity when the factories they are mothballing and the lives they are destroying are invisible. Port Talbot, however, would seem hard to ignore. As you approach on the M4, which undulates gamely on stilts across the skyline, the view of the vast Tata Steel plant is bracing. The hills on the inland side are squat, solid-looking lumps but greenish and pleasant enough. The sea glints on the far side of the works. You may catch sight of beautiful Aberavon Beach. Whitish steam – and a 50th of the UK’s CO₂ emissions – curls up into grey estuarial cloud.

Like all fenced-in plants, Tata Steel’s is mysterious. Unless you’re a worker or on official business, you can’t go in to ogle the torpedo-shaped trains, giants’ ladles and tuyeres (smelting nozzles), or survey the piles of iron ore, limestone, coke and coal that are alchemised into cars and ships and surgical scalpels and hip flasks. You can’t hang out at places with names like Monolithic Refractories, Margam Knuckle Yard or Middle Mother Ditch. Geeks have been allowed to tour the site in the past, but that was during a lull in the bad news cycle.

Baglan Bay, next door, augurs a possible future for Port Talbot (and all mono-industrial towns): a decaying void of ghostly fields, dead turbine halls and gutted offices where petrochemicals were manufactured for four decades and, subsequently, a gas-fired power station operated – for just 17 years between 2003 and 2020. It is technically off limits to ruin-ramblers, but brave psychogeographers of abandonment do occasionally go in and report their findings.

A great monastic complex once stood on this exposed coast. Margam Abbey was founded in the 12th century by the Cistercians, an order that was spreading with imperialistic vigour from its base in Cîteaux, near Dijon. Gerald of Wales was entertained there and praised the abbot, Conan, for his peerless acts of charity. Henry VIII dissolved what was a thriving commercial operation, and the estate was handed over to the Rice Mansel family and their heirs right up until 1941.

Baglan and Margam were welded to Aberafan to create Port Talbot – after Harrow-educated Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot, an MP for 60 years as well as an industrialist pushed bills through parliament to expand his commercial interests. Sheep, coal and iron ore – Wales’s unholy trinity – drove the local economy. Port Talbot was a maritime powerhouse long before Cardiff rose to prominence.

When the M4 came, the model village of Groes,