Part 2

SOUTHERN BORDER

1.

Autumn with its mellow fruitfulness has always been my favourite season. It marks the beginning of the school year, of course, there's the harvest and the changing of the leaves, and the drinks with their doses of cinnamon, ginger, and pumpkin spice, all of which I enjoy. But what I value most of all about this time of year is light. In the valley of my childhood, the months of September and October saw the bracken on the hillsides flare bright orange and copper before winter decay set in. By its warming glow I could forget the creeping darkness of my north-facing bedroom and the absence of the sun for months at a time. Many cultures have festivals of light at this point: Hindus and Sikhs celebrate Diwali with fireworks and lanterns, Jews light a candle to mark Rosh Hashanah and the passage of the new year, and Christians celebrate Advent with candles of their own. Four in all: one for each Sunday leading up to Christmas.

As often as I can, I travel south at this time of year, either physically or through music and literature, and so it is, in the autumn of 2023, that I find myself mulling over the southern end of the valleys metropolis. But where does it end? To find out, I've caught the bus to the Tesco superstore at Gellihirion and from there plan to follow the Taff Trail to a point at which I no longer feel like I am in Ponty.

The contours of this footpath-cum-cycleway are unmistakably those of Victorian engineering, for this was once the route of the Pontypridd-Caerphilly-Newport Railway, which ran through to Newport's Alexandra Dock. The lines are true, the gradients are kept to a minimum, and the occasional overhead crossings, bridges and so forth, stand at a uniform height, one suited to steam locomotives best of all. No trains have run along here since the 1960s, however, and passenger travel ceased long before.

The supermarket and its car park are built on land that was once part of Gellihirion farm, a wedge of agricultural production set between the Glamorganshire Canal downhill to the west and the railway uphill to the east. The farm was never wealthy and consisted only of a few buildings and associated fields, even at its height. But here it is, still, preserved in metal and ink on a road sign and in the name of a minor industrial estate.

Almost two hundred years ago, the resident occupier was a tenant farmer called William Morgan. He paid rent to an absentee landlord: Robert Henry Clive, a Conservative politician and grandson of the infamous Clive of India.

The Clive family's subcontinental fortune, enhanced by Robert Henry's marriage to Harriet Windsor, daughter of the Earl of Plymouth, enabled vast land acquisition in South Wales just before steam coal deposits were discovered in the valleys to the north of here. The family swapped their mission abroad for that of domestic business and commerce. Money never stopped rolling in; that is, into the pockets of the Windsor-Clives. Harriet used her own wealth to develop Penarth Dock to break the monopoly of the Marquess of Bute's haven at Cardiff. Penarth itself was developed as an estate village, as were Radyr and St Fagans. To be fair to them, the family did sink some of their money into housing (rented out, of course, for this was no social enterprise), into coal mines, into the railways, and gave other sums away as philanthropic gestures towards the public realm, but there was always more profit to be had and they were never in danger of spending it all on us.

The imperial legacy of the Clives (and the later, Windsor-Clives) is heavily disguised at Gellihirion and by a quirk of preservation: Welsh-language placenames remain in use. Here, at least, the family made no effort to impose themselves, as they did in coal villages like Ynysybwl (where many of the streets are named after family members), and the municipal housing estates constructed between the two world wars paid homage to other things. Between Powis Castle, Penarth, St Fagans, Grangetown in Cardiff, and parliament, to which the Windsor-Clives were frequently elected (usually for seats in Shropshire), there was no further need to aggrandise: the money was quite enough. And so, Gellihirion survived and Rhydyfelin survived, although both were fated in the end to be villages bypassed by the motorcar.

Few travellers pay attention to communities that lie either side of their route, whether they are in a car, a bus, or a train. Furtive glances are exchanged and that is that. The rationalised rail network races from taffs well to treforest and pontypridd, with occasional halts at treforest industrial estate. Road signs on the A470, which the locals adventurously refer to as the motorway, do point to Upper Boat and Gellihirion, Hawthorn and Rhydyfelin, but they are hardly tourist destinations. Unless you are a pedestrian.

It takes me a few minutes to walk to Rhydyfelin from the supermarket. When planners sat down after the First World War, keen to modernise Ponty's ageing housing stock and to stamp a municipal identity on the area, these formerly green fields were chosen as their garden suburb. Nature was to be recalled by streets named after trees: sycamore, chestnut, poplar, willow, oak, holly, cedar, and elm. Housing was low density, semi-detached for the most part, and each unit had enough private green space that tenants could enjoy the twin hobbies of gardening and keeping an allotment. Ah, the good life.

Before the war, this had been an altogether quite different place. The only houses here were terraces, all set directly across the river from the Treforest Tinplate Works, which was owned and operated by the Crawshays of Merthyr Tydfil. At least one row of houses had been constructed by the former Pontypridd Urban District Council, an Edwardian experiment in public provision. The Ordnance Survey map, which I call up on my phone, announces council street rather proudly, although these days it is more wistfully known as ynys terrace. You can tell that the Edwardian administrators who planned these houses had no intention of reinventing the town and its prevailing image: the terrace is uniform, two up two down, with a direct doorway onto the street and a long, narrow back garden. The only difference between these homes and those built by private speculators was the rent went to the council collector not to the Estate and its big house at St Fagans.

But I am getting ahead of myself. What I'm looking for as I wander around is another housing experiment, or the site of it at least: the Round House, which stood on Dyffryn Road from 1834 until its demolition in 1938. It was built as the result of a competition between Francis Crawshay, owner-operator of the Treforest Tinplate Works, and the Chartist, co-operator, surgeon, and cremation pioneer, Dr William Price. Their wager: to discover who could build the greatest number of houses on the smallest possible site. Price conceived of a design inspired by the eight points of the compass and a barrel.

A single, round building was erected, with eight segments-cumhouses, each of four storeys. There were internal spiral staircases and chimneys that raised from the roof and recalled - or perhaps mimicked - given Price's predilections - an ancient henge. The entrance to the site was via a stone arch, another imitation of imagined Celtic prehistory. It is a pity that the museum at St Fagans came into existence too late, this would have been an ideal submission to its anti-industrial fantasia.

Demolition of Price's prize-winning construction was necessary because the fields to the rear, now a housing estate, were destined to become the site of Pontypridd Junior Technical School - predecessor to Pontypridd College of Further Education, later Coleg Morgannwg - which opened to students in January 1943. Teenagers learned those skills regarded as suitable for the post-war world, one in which the commercial modernism of the industrial estate would triumph over the old-fashioned routine of going underground. I am reminded of a passage in Gwyn Thomas's satirical novel, The Thinker and the Thrush, which was published posthumously in 1988 but written in this post-war moment. One of the everyman characters reflects that 'I could have gone to the Technical School when I was twelve and done well as a draughtsman or fitter down at the Bandy Lane Trading estate' but instead he (the character) preferred to 'make quiet fun of the inefficiency' of managers and their assistants, as if in anticipation of similar behaviour by the more famous rebels of the late-1950s and 1960s, Alan Sillitoe's Arthur Seaton and David Storey's Frank Machin.

The only hint that either a school or a college was ever here is the street sign which declares this to be college way. In fact, it's just a small portion of Cardiff Road renamed to memorialise what was once here, otherwise this housing estate is as anonymous as any other. There's a heol gruffydd and parc y dyffryn and I wonder whether I have been momentarily transplanted to Rhydyfelin in Aberystwyth. There is a computerised ugliness to both estates but at least in Ceredigion they are reflexive enough to accept postmodernity, having skipped...