Welsh Journals

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WELSH INDUSTRIAL WORKERS HOUSING, 1775-1875. By J. B. Lowe. National Museum of Wales, 1977. Pp. 64; 48 plates. No one with roots in industrial Wales can fail to be fascinated by this superbly produced booklet. It offers quite beautifully evocative monochrome photography, plans and sections of the houses, map references, and a concise yet stimulating text by J. B. Lowe which clearly reveals an encyclopaedic knowledge and thorough scholarship. The booklet quite rightly is specifically directed at local-history and preser- vation groups, and the National Museum's intention was to provide a spur towards the documentation and preservation of early industrial housing in Wales. It is both appropriate and depressing, then, that the cover illustration is of the famous, but now flattened, triangle at Pentrebach, for we are immediately put in mind of the vandalism that this publication is meant to abate. One's hope can only be that this volume reaches a wider audience than the local-history societies. One hopes, for instance, that during the summer months it will be purchased by all those who normally buy that never-ending sequence of volumes depicting Harlech Castle and the beach at Tenby, for here now are the photographs of the other and essential Wales. Politicians can ill afford to ignore this volume for it provides a clue to many of Wales's social problems. Mr. Lowe reminds us that, the Merthyr region apart, Wales was spared many of the worst features of those back-to-back and cellar dwellings that blighted the industrial north, but also that in Wales 'circumstances have favoured the survival of early housing'. Paradoxically, the imperative of preservation has to accompany the imperative of reform and improvement in a region of Britain that has the highest percentage of old housing stock. Mr. Lowe's explanation that in Wales 'the tide of industry which flowed up the valleys onto the high moorlands often receded rapidly leaving many settlements isolated' serves not only as a detached historic judgement but as a warning for our time. Perchance the booklet will fall into the hands of the historians of industrial Wales. We are reminded that the history of industrial housing in Wales 'has yet to be written'. Mr. Lowe's commentary provides a marvellous incentive. He creates many useful distinctions and definitions, illustrates the use of many sources (his most exciting page juxtaposes a photograph of Upper New Rank, Blaenavon, with a diagram illustrating the 1841 Census Return for the street), reminds us that industry and industrial housing were to be found throughout Wales and generally puts forward stimulating ideas. We wait now for the historians to begin what Professor Dyos and his associates have done for Camberwell and for urban England and to add to the pioneer efforts in Wales of Hamish Richards. More recently, the way forward has been indicated in Martin Daunton's brilliant examination of the sociology, topography and economics of housing in Cardiff. What was the precise balance between company, speculative, building society and privately-built housing in Wales? At what precise moment, and for how many families, did the filth and squalor of the Chartist era give way to Victorian utility and then to the limited comfort that characterized at least some homes in Mabon's day?