I’m taking a University class out tomorrow to look at some industrial housing history around Hafod and Landore. Housing history was the central theme of my research in the 1990s amd I must have surveyed and mapped hundreds of Glamorgan houses as I worked to understand industry, landscape and the housing needs of the early coal and metal industries.
Shape is one of the most important features of early (pre-1919) houses and it became a bit of a party trick when I could guess for other people the decade in which their original house was built. Although many of Swansea’s earliest industrial houses were swept away in the 1920s as part of slum clearance, quite a few of the classic examples still remain. Beyong the boundary of the original County Borough of Swansea, neighbouring local authorities did not clear their older houses and many survive in villages, cwms, and valleys near the pits and factories they served.
These are the handouts fr0m ‘Housing History 101’ from my teaching days. I suppose these types of documents (and clip art!) are history themselves now LOL.
Nigel Robins 