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Helen Mark travels to just beyond the Brecon Beacons National Park, to the town of Blaenafon. It's a small town set in the rolling hills and valleys of South Wales. Though Blaenafon is set in rural Wales it is an industrial town that straddles a place between two worlds, the rural idyll of the Brecons and the industrial cities of South Wales. Blaenafon owes its existence to the minerals that lie below the mountains: iron and coal.


Blaenafon and the surrounding industrial landscape was made a World Heritage Site in 2000 to mark its importance in the manufacture of iron at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The town is dotted with museums, the highlights of which are the Iron Works and Big Pit, both dedicated to Blaenafon's industrial past.

At the beginning of the 20th century Blaenafon was a boom town, the iron and steel industries brought in thousands of people and the town grew in size and prosperity. But all that ended when the coal mining industry collapsed in the 1980s and the town has struggled to recover. But the answer to its future may lay in its past. Using the visitors that are attracted to the heritage museums, Blaenafon could re-invent itself as a tourist centre.

Ceri Thompson was a miner for 16 years and worked in a pit near Pontypridd. He is now curator of the Big Pit Museum. He always wanted to work in a museum and with his mining experience he is now able work in one now. He spent 15 years after his redundancy working to build a new life. He went to university and did the trail of museum jobs often for no money in order to achieve his dream of becoming a curator. He was involved in the strike of 1984/5 and stood on the picket line.

When you look across the landscape from the Big Pit one side is beautiful, if barren, mountainside dotted with woodland and the other is scarred, resembling a shelled landscape from World War I. There was another colliery in that area and all there is to show of it now is a black stain on the hillside. If Big Pit hadn't been made into a museum then the same would have happened to that.


Helen meets Stephani Nummerlin, who was brought up in Blaenafon and remembers it as a busy bustling industrial town. With her husband Andrew she opened a bookshop as part of a booktown initiative similar to that in Hay-on-Wye. She thinks it's interesting that books are once again the focus for the town as it is often forgotten that miners were great readers and in Blaenafon the miners paid for the Workmen's Hall and the library it contained was the town's social and cultural hub. She thinks they would approve of the town's new identity.


Stephani remembers the pride in the town as she was growing up and hopes that can be regained. She was married in the local church, built in 1805, which has an iron font, gravestones and windows. She had been away from the area for 30 years living abroad and came back periodically to visit family. She was saddened to see the area's gradual decline and the population aging as young people moved away to find work.

Keith Blanchard worked as a miner and medic in the mines for 30 years and was heavily involved in picketing during the miners strike. He started a new business and picked up the threads of his life, but he's still bitter about the way the miners were treated.

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