Swansea

• 1. Introduction

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  Swansea sits at the mouth of the River Tawe on the south-west coast of Wales, and for roughly two centuries it ran the world's copper supply. At its peak in the 1850s, more than 600 furnaces burned along the Tawe, and a fleet of 500 oceangoing ships carried coal out and metal ore in from every inhabited continent. The city earned a nickname that said everything: Copperopolis. What built that empire, what killed it, and what Swansea became when the furnaces went cold are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Names and Origins

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  The Welsh name Abertawe, meaning the mouth or estuary of the Tawe, appears in written records as early as 1150 under the spelling Aper Tyui. The fifteenth-century bard Lewis Glyn Cothi used an older name, Caer Wyr, referring to a great fortress in the area that was already in ruins by his time.

  The English name has a stranger genealogy. It first appears as Sweynesse in the town's first Royal charter, issued sometime between 1158 and 1184, but coins minted around 1140 already carry versions of the name. In 1722 the antiquarian Thomas Hearne traced the name to a "King Swanus" and his entire fleet, said to have drowned at what he called Swenawick alias Swanesey, reading it as "the sea of Swanus". The most widely held theory for a long time was simpler and odder: "swine sea", supposedly reflecting the large number of porpoises in Swansea Bay.

  The current consensus points to Old Norse roots. The suffix -ey, meaning island or inlet, combined with the Viking personal name Svein or Sweyn, may refer to a sandbank at the river's mouth or a patch of raised ground in the surrounding marshland. Some accounts go further and name the eponym as Sweyn Forkbeard, who lived roughly between 960 and 1014.

• 3. Deep Prehistory

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  Long Hole Cave on the Gower Peninsula has yielded finds interpreted as traces of the first modern humans in Britain. Not far away, at Paviland, a ceremonial burial was discovered in 1823 and dated to 22,000 BC, making it the oldest known ceremonial burial in Western Europe.

  The peninsula is also dotted with Bronze Age and Iron Age remains: the burial mound at Cillibion, hill forts at Llwynheiernin and Cil Ifor, and the ruins of a Roman villa on the same peninsula that shelters those far older sites. The area that would become the city was known in ancient Welsh political geography as the Cantref Eginog, sitting on the eastern edge of the commote of Gwyr and within the territory of Ystrad Tywi. The Welsh kingdoms contested it for its valuable farmland long before any smelting furnace was ever lit.

• 4. Conquest and Charter

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  During the Viking Age the mouth of the Tawe became a hub for trade, and a post was likely founded somewhere between the 9th and 11th centuries. Welsh control ended when Iestyn ap Gwrgant ceded the settlement to Henry de Beaumont, 1st Earl of Warwick, as part of the new Lordship of Gower in the early 1100s.

  Henry built Swansea Castle around 1106 and minted coins carrying the names Swensi, Sweni, and Svenshi around 1140. The town received its first borough charter from William de Newburgh, 3rd Earl of Warwick, sometime between 1158 and 1184. That document contains the earliest English-language reference to Sweynesse and granted the burgesses specific rights to develop the area. King John added a second charter in 1215, in which the name appears as Sweyneshe. A third charter followed in 1304.

• 5. Copperopolis

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  The first copper smelter at Swansea was established in 1717. The economics behind it were straightforward but decisive: smelting a single ton of copper ore consumed roughly three tons of coal, making it far cheaper to ship the ore to the coalfields than to send the coal to Cornwall. Once smelting was established, the smelters began drawing high-grade ore and ore concentrates from around the world.

  By the 1850s Swansea had more than 600 furnaces and a fleet of 500 oceangoing ships. At that point most of the copper matte produced in the United States was being sent to Swansea for refining, including ore from Arizona in the 1850s and Colorado in the 1860s. The smelters also processed arsenic, zinc, tin, silver, and gold from complex ores arriving from multiple continents. Nearby factories added tinplate and pottery to the city's industrial portfolio.

  Swansea's population grew by 500% between the late 17th century and 1801. The first official census, taken in 1841, recorded 6,099 inhabitants within the borough boundaries, already larger than Cardiff. The true figure at the time was around 10,117, because much of the built-up area lay outside the contemporary borough limits. In 1881 more than a third of the borough's population had been born outside Swansea and Glamorgan, and just under a quarter had been born outside Wales entirely.

  The global reach of Swansea's copper trade extended to Chile, where a businessman named Charles Saint Lambert imported smelting technology from Swansea and sent Chilean copper ore concentrate back for processing. Lambert's success in modernising the Chilean copper industry during the second quarter of the nineteenth century is considered to have planted the seeds of the eventual decline of copper smelting in Swansea itself. The price of copper fell from £112 in 1860 to £35 in the 1890s; Cornish mining contracted; and when North and South American mines shifted to lower-grade deposits in the early 1900s, the ore could no longer bear the cost of transporting it to Wales.

• 6. The First Railway

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  In 1804, the Swansea and Mumbles Railway was built to carry limestone from the Mumbles quarries and coal from the Clyne Valley to Swansea and its markets. On the day it first carried fare-paying passengers, British Parliament abolished the transportation of enslaved people from Africa. That coincidence gives the railway two historical footnotes at once.

  The Mumbles Railway later transitioned from horse power to steam and then to electric trams before closing in January 1960, replaced by motor buses. It is recorded as having carried the world's first fare-paying rail passengers.

• 7. Blitz and Reinvention

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  On the 19th, 20th, and the 21st of February 1941, German bombing destroyed much of the Swansea town centre in what became known as the Three Nights Blitz. The city's industrial importance had made it a target.

  The Lower Swansea Valley, which the copper era had left filled with derelict works and mounds of waste, was gradually reclaimed through the Lower Swansea Valley Scheme. The docks were repurposed: North Dock became Parc Tawe, and South Dock was converted into the Marina. In 1969, Swansea was granted city status to mark Prince Charles's investiture as the Prince of Wales, with the Prince announcing the designation on the 3rd of July 1969 during a tour of Wales. The city obtained the right to have a Lord Mayor in 1982.

  By the 2021 census, Swansea's population stood at 238,500, a fractional 0.2% lower than the 239,023 recorded in 2011. Over 90% of the roughly 105,900 people estimated to work within the City and County are now employed in service sectors, a transformation from a city whose entire identity was once built on metal and fire.

• 8. Dylan Thomas and Swansea's Voices

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  Dylan Thomas was born and spent his first 23 years at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in the Uplands area of Swansea. He produced two-thirds of his published work in the bedroom of that house, which has been restored to its condition in 1914, the year his family moved in, a few months before he was born. Thomas described Swansea as an "ugly lovely town". In the 1930s he was part of a circle of local artists, writers, and musicians called the Kardomah Gang, who met at the Kardomah Cafe in Castle Street until that building was bombed during the war. Vernon Watkins, poet and translator, was a close friend of Thomas who Thomas personally recruited into the group.

  The BBC has maintained a studio in Swansea since 1924, and Thomas worked there during the interwar years, when the facility broadcast on the BBC Regional Programme. His legacy in the city is marked by the Dylan Thomas Centre, which holds a permanent exhibition titled Dylan Thomas: Man and Myth, and by the annual Dylan Thomas Festival, which runs from the 27th of October to the 9th of November.

  Swansea has produced a wide range of other notable figures. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, was born in the city and educated at Dynevor School before reading theology at Christ's College, Cambridge. Ernest Jones, psychoanalyst and official biographer of Sigmund Freud, was born in Gowerton and educated at Swansea Grammar School. In 1904, a miner from the nearby village of Loughor named Evan Roberts led what has been described as one of the world's greatest Protestant religious revivals, converting around 100,000 people within a few months. Actor Matt Ryan, from Swansea, voiced Edward Kenway in the video game Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. The character was originally written as a Londoner; when Ryan auditioned with a London accent and got the part, the production team heard his actual Swansea accent and rewrote the character's hometown to match.