Fixing Dyfatty for 200 years

Good morning, Swansea!

Just up from Swansea High Street, two tower blocks stand on Griffith John Street, which shares its name with one of the area's most remarkable former residents.

In the 1840s, Griffith John was a teenage preacher at nearby Ebenezer Chapel, on the edge of the cramped courts that once covered the ground where Dyfatty flats now stand - a place where families shared one privy between five houses and queued for hours at a single spout for water.

Both John's parents succumbed to cholera, and he later left for China, where he spent over half a century as a missionary, providing healthcare and education in communities facing conditions not unlike those he had grown up with.

Meanwhile, Swansea has spent the nearly two centuries since trying to fix the area he left behind.

This week, we're looking at how Dyfatty went from Victorian scandal to post-war tower blocks, and why the people living there have waited so long for someone to get it right.

I’ll catch you on Sunday!

At the start of the 1800s, the land above High Street was mostly fields, but within a generation it had disappeared under cheap, hastily built housing for the labourers pouring in to work at Swansea's copperworks, squeezed into narrow courts and alleys that ran down towards the Dyfatty stream.

When a government inspector reported on the town's sanitation in 1849, the Dyfatty courts were among the worst he found. He described Howell Court as "a long, narrow, close, and ill paved alley," where tenants paid a shilling a week and carried their water up from the stream. On nearby Mariner Street, a local surveyor recorded one privy so badly flooded that "the seat can be reached only by means of large stones."

Some two-room homes held as many as twelve people, many of them Irish families who had fled the famine. One court was so crowded with them that it was known simply as Little Ireland, and the inspector singled it out as among the filthiest in town. Within weeks of his visit, cholera returned to Swansea, and these were the streets that suffered the heaviest losses.

A generation later, little had changed. In September 1873, the Cambrian newspaper asked whether anything could lift "these wretched and miserable creatures from the slough of despond." It also wondered aloud whether the people of Regent Court and Howell Court were "so polluted and fallen as to be utterly beyond the pale of reclamation."

A possible solution arrived in 1875, when a new Act of Parliament gave councils the power to buy up and demolish slum housing. The Cambrian urged the Corporation to start with the "dens of infamy" it had been railing against for years, beginning with Regent Court. In their place, it wanted "wide streets and commodious houses."

However, several of the courts' landlords were local dignitaries, including Swansea's own MP, Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn. They expected compensation for the rents they would lose, and when the ground was finally cleared, what replaced the courts wasn't housing at all, but a grand new road - Alexandra Road. Over the following decades, it filled with some of the town's finest buildings, from the old Central Library to the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery.

By 1879, even the Cambrian was admitting the scheme would "not benefit the artizan population at all." Most of the families pushed out of the courts simply squeezed into the crowded streets next door, and there they stayed for the best part of a century.

By the end of the Second World War, Britain was desperately short of homes. Swansea alone had lost thousands in the Blitz, and Victorian slums like Dyfatty's were still standing. For planners, the answer was to build upwards: tower blocks went up quickly, fitted hundreds of families onto small plots, and from 1956 the government paid councils a bigger subsidy the higher they built. To many people they looked like the future - "streets in the sky", with lifts, bathrooms and modern kitchens in place of shared privies and outdoor taps.

In the early 1960s, six high-rise blocks went up across Dyfatty and neighbouring Griffith John Street, in pairs on Matthew Street, Croft Street and Griffith John Street. The Croft Street towers rose fourteen storeys above High Street, while the others stood eleven storeys high.

For many of the families who moved in, it was a revelation. Many had come from the cleared slum streets nearby and were enjoying running hot water and central heating for the first time.

Former residents and their families recall a playground with a big slide at the foot of the Matthew Street block, where grandchildren spent their weekends and summer holidays. Others remember the nearby Swan pub and the Lord Nelson, their fathers watching bowls on the green below, and high-floor flats facing the bay with "the most fantastic views over Swansea."

Not everyone shared the residents' affection for the place. In 2004, Neath demolition firm Cuddy Group asked the public which building in south Wales they would most like to see torn down, and the Dyfatty flats came top. Residents and the council were quick to leap to their defence, pointing to the views, the convenience of living on the city's doorstep, and the good schools nearby. But the flats have struggled to shake that reputation ever since.

The flats have had several rounds of improvements over the years, including a £1.7m upgrade around a decade ago that brought two of the blocks up to Welsh housing standards. The latest work, though, is by far the most visible. Matthew Street has already been transformed, and the council has moved on to Croft Street, where the towers and their low-rise neighbours are being re-clad and fitted with new kitchens, bathrooms, lifts, sprinklers and fob-entry doors.

It isn't just the flats. In June, a row of long-empty shops on High Street reopened as Dyfatty Junction, a community space for drop-ins, advice, training and local activity that residents are helping to shape, with the aim of eventually running it themselves. Meanwhile, a £20m, ten-year programme known as North Gate Swansea is getting under way across Dyfatty and its neighbouring streets, steered by a board that includes local residents.

Once Croft Street is finished, the work moves on to Griffith John Street, the last of Dyfatty's towers still waiting its turn, on a street that shares its name with the boy who preached on the hillside nearly two centuries ago.

I'll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

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Sources: Matthews House, Greenhill Gardens Trail ("The Evolution of Housing"), quoting the 1849 report to the General Board of Health on Swansea; The Cambrian via Welsh Newspapers Online (5 Sept 1873, 2 Apr 1875, 14 Mar 1879); GENUKI: Swansea; Dictionary of Welsh Biography and John Aaron, Griffith John (2016); Swansea Council (Griffith John blue plaque; tower blocks; Croft Street refurbishment; Dyfatty Junction; North Gate Swansea); Insider Media (Dyfatty flats upgrade, 2015); 2004 press coverage of the Cuddy Group poll; memories shared in local Swansea Facebook groups