About Rhondda

Secrets of ‘Britain’s best high street’: what the rest of us can learn from a small town in the Rhondda The valley stretched for a distance of eight or ten miles between two nearly parallel lines of hills, broken by a succession of cliffs of singular beauty……. The emerald greeness of the meadows in the valley below was most refreshing…… The air is aromatic with the wild flowers and mountain plants. A Sabbath stillness reigns …. it is the gem of Glamorganshire. Charles Cliffe, The Book of South Wales, 1847The river Rhondda is a dark turgid, and contaminated gutter, into which is poured the refuse of the host of collieries which skirt the thirteen miles of its course. The hills have been stripped of all their woodland beauty, and there they stand, rugged and bare, with immense rubbish heaps covering their surface …. The whole length of the valley has become transformed … the din of steam engines, the whirr of machinery, the grating sound of coal screens, and the hammering of the smithies proceed increasingly night and day, year in and year out. An unheard of wealth of industry and a great population have simultaneously sprung up together during the past sixty years … The industrial townships of this valley appear to be inseparably connected in one continuous series of streets of workmens’ cottages to Pontypridd. A Morris, Glamorgan, 1908. The above contrasting descriptions of the Rhondda appear in David Egan’s Coal Society (A History of the South Wales Mining Valleys, 1840-1980). Published in 1987 by Gomer Press.