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The First Industrial Nation
Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries the economy was transformed. Wales was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, innovating in technology and organisation, and experiencing novel social changes and major alterations to the landscape. These developments have left a legacy of sites and landscapes that are, in their way, as precious as the remains of Renaissance Italy or Ancient Greece. By the 1851 census Wales had become the first country to count more people employed in industry than in agriculture. It was one of the leading industrial exporters of the world, and everyday life for most people had changed fundamentally. During the same period increasing wealth led to unprecedented urbanisation, movements to improve agriculture, and large investments in architecture.
A driving force was the unprecedented growth in population, which more than doubled between 1780 and 1851, reaching 1,189,000. War in Europe, especially with France from 1793 to the fall of Napoleon in 1815, created demand and raised prices, encouraging investment in industry and the exploitation of marginal land for agriculture. There was even an invasion: the minor incursion of French troops at Fishguard in 1797.
While the effects of industrialisation were felt in all parts of Wales, industry was localised, notably in Swansea, the heads of the south Wales valleys, and the Greenfield valley of Flintshire. In the ironmaking towns of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire the population grew faster than in almost every other part of Britain as a result of rising birth rates and large-scale migration, primarily from rural Wales. A distinctive working-class society emerged which was to remain largely Welsh-speaking, even in the new industrial towns, until the end of the nineteenth century. Rural areas saw a decline in population, especially in the marginal uplands, as people pursued the opportunities offered by wages and urban communities. In both town and country, there was a rapid expansion in nonconformity, and chapels became familiar features of the Welsh landscape.
The essential material for many industries was coal, found abundantly in the south and the north-east. Its prime use was in the metals industries; while export of coal began in the late eighteenth century, its boom time as an independent industry was a century later. The earliest Welsh industries to become internationally important were connected with non-ferrous metals. Mining for lead, copper or silver ore had taken place in most parts of Wales at one time or another. The scale of activity increased and during the Industrial Revolution the lead mines in upland Cardiganshire, Montgomeryshire, Denbighshire and Flintshire employed thousands of people. Thomas Williams developed Mynydd Parys on Anglesey into the world’s biggest copper mine in the late eighteenth century and the port at Amlwch, which served it, grew to be briefly the second largest town in Wales, with over 5,000 people. To process his Anglesey ore Williams developed a chain of smelting and manufacturing works, including water-powered mills in the Greenfield valley at Holywell and the Middle and Upper Bank copperworks at Swansea.
The industrial-scale smelting of copper was introduced to Britain from Germany in 1584, in the form of a new works near Neath in Glamorgan. From 1717 it was centred on the River Tawe above Swansea, using ore brought across the Bristol Channel: it concentrated on the Swansea side because the quantities of fuel used were greater than the quantities of ore and ships could return to Devon and Cornwall with coal. Thirteen works were established by the early nineteenth century, and soon 90 per cent of Britain’s copper smelting capacity was located within twenty miles of Swansea. There were also smelters for zinc, lead, silver and other metals. Eighteenth-century copperworks did not employ more than a hundred but those established in the early nineteenth century had workforces of over a thousand. At the time of the 1841 census the lower Swansea valley was the largest concentration of population in Wales, housing some 40,000 people divided equally between the mercantile town and its industrial settlements. The valley filled with poisonous fumes and smouldering slag tips.
The second of the internationally important metals industries of Wales was iron. Blast furnaces were established in Glamorgan and Monmouthshire in the late sixteenth century to exploit local charcoal supplies and ore from the rims of the south Wales and Forest of Dean coalfields. All of the early ironworks were small, charcoal-fuelled and water-powered, and they were distributed widely, the only cluster being in the Wye valley. The discovery in 1709 by Abraham Darby of Coalbrookdale of how to smelt iron with coked coal rather than with charcoal paved the way for the revolution in the iron industry, but the method was taken up only slowly at first. In 1713 Darby planned an iron furnace at Dol-gun, east of Dolgellau, and his fellow Quaker, Charles Lloyd, built a furnace at Bersham near Wrexham in 1717 which he converted to coke in 1721. The use of coal allowed furnaces to be larger and grouped together and a burst of new works helped transform the iron trade of Britain. Hirwaun furnace was the first in south Wales to use coke, in 1757, followed by Dowlais two years later. Along the heads of the valleys vast territories rich in coal, ironstone and lime were leased to new enterprises and all the latest methods were applied on a grand, coordinated scale. The works of the new generation were multi-furnace, coke-fired, mainly steam-powered, and usually integrated with puddling furnaces to make wrought iron. By 1830 south Wales produced 40 per cent of all British pig iron and had a greater capacity than any other ironmaking region in the world.
Other industries also contributed to the transformation of the economy. The long-established woollen industry burgeoned in the early nineteenth century, though it was still largely a domestic industry and most factories were built after 1850. At Newtown in Montgomeryshire the number of handloom weavers grew rapidly from the 1790s and a new suburb of houses with loom-shops above was laid out at Penygloddfa. Brewing quenched the thirst of the new urban and industrial workforce. Brickmaking grew to supply the needs of smelting and building. Limestone quarrying and lime-burning expanded to provide mortar and lime fertiliser. The spectacular rise of the slate industry in north-west Wales began in the late eighteenth century, though it reached its greatest scale in the late nineteenth, roofing buildings as far away as South America and Australia.
The territory of the mineral fields posed major challenges for entrepreneurs. Shipping connected harbours around the coasts and was of great importance in bringing ore to Swansea, taking finished copper to brass mills in Bristol, distributing slates, exporting iron, and carrying imported consumer goods. Improvements to harbours and lighthouses were made to assist this flourishing exchange by sea. On the other hand, penetration of the hinterlands was arduous. The uplands were agriculturally poor, and improved turnpike roads arrived late by English standards, though some impressive bridges were built, most notably William Edwards’s Bridge at Pontypridd of 1756, for two generations probably the largest masonry span in the world.
Canals and horse-worked railways were a joint solution to the transport problems of industry. Canals were promoted by companies of small shareholders during the investment mania of the 1790s, climbing up strategic valleys in south Wales and crossing from the English lowlands to Denbighshire. The railways fed coal, iron and limestone to these waterways from the hillsides: south Wales probably possessed the densest networks of horse-worked railways ever built, perhaps extending more than 1,000 miles. Other early railways brought slate from the mountain quarries to the ports of north-west Wales – from Penrhyn in 1801, Dinorwic and Nantlle in the 1820s and Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1836. Such facilities transformed the economics of production by lowering transport costs: new mines and quarries opened wherever they reached mineral reserves. In 1809 Walter Coffin opened Dinas level in the Rhondda, providing the first glimmer of the enormous growth to come in the central coalfield. In 1841 the Taff Vale Railway became Wales’s first completely locomotive-hauled public railway and its penetration of the lower Rhondda, following the completion of the Bute West Dock in Cardiff in 1839, created further opportunities for coal exporting.
The designers and entrepreneurs in Welsh industry and transport were innovators: they are credited with the earliest all-iron rails, the first railway viaducts, the first recorded use of a locomotive to haul a load (by Richard Trevithick in 1803) and the first railway passenger service in 1807. At Bersham, John Wilkinson developed a boring-machine to make cannon and steam-engine cylinders. Thomas Williams led important innovations in copper manufacture that improved the sheathing of ships’ hulls. The capabilities of locally-trained engineers such as Watkin George at Cyfarthfa produced numerous innovations: George built the first ever iron aqueduct and railway bridge in 1793 and some of the first large-span iron roofs. These prototypes informed the design of Pontcysyllte aqueduct, which in turn influenced aqueduct construction in many countries. Through his work on the Ellesmere Canal and the Holyhead Road, Thomas Telford developed important techniques for iron engineering, earthwork construction and project management that were to influence engineering internationally.
The end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth were an age of ‘improvers’. The idea of progress was in the forefront of the minds of landowners who promoted the improvement of agriculture and the infrastructure of the countryside. The enthusiasm reached its height during the Industrial Revolution and especially the French Wars, when population was growing rapidly, corn prices were exceptionally high and Enlightenment thinking challenged the status quo. The improvers, singly or in companies, built roads and bridges, enclosed fields, drained land, and developed and disseminated better agricultural techniques, such as planned farm buildings and the use of lime to improve the soil. Enclosure by Act of Parliament had a major impact on the landscape after the 1760s, imposing regular field boundaries on open commons.
The Industrial Revolution was a period of enormous growth in the number and size of towns. The rate of growth was phenomenal in mining and manufacturing areas – towns like Merthyr Tydfil and Tredegar – but resorts like Tenby, county towns like Abergavenny and Wrexham, and ports like Caernarfon and Newport also expanded. Of course, many towns functioned on several levels and so grew especially fast: Swansea was a resort, mining town, manufacturing centre, regional centre and port. Other towns without important functions stagnated. Most towns grew in an unordered way, as in ironmaking settlements like Blaenavon. Houses followed the lines of horse-worked railways and fitted between mines, furnaces and tips: streets with names like Tram Side, Cinder Hill or Furnace Row were commonplace across the heads of the south Wales valleys.
The web of hardships and opportunities presented by the Industrial Revolution was apparent in industrial towns more than anywhere. They seldom had sanitation adequate to their densities of people crowded into them, and periodic epidemics could decimate them – the hill-top cemetery at Tredegar is an evocative reminder of the cholera epidemics to which settlements were vulnerable. Housing conditions were poor by later standards, but they compared favourably with the hovels of the rural poor. Some industrialists offered an education for the children of their employees in works schools, but child labour remained ubiquitous. Works schools contributed to the spread of English (making Wales largely bilingual by the mid-nineteenth century), while the Methodist revivals starting in industrial communities stimulated and supported Welsh. Wage-earners had far more disposable income, but dependence on industrial masters was a cause of strife, expressed in the grain riots of the 1790s and reaching a crescendo in the Merthyr Rising of 1831 and the Chartist riots of 1839, during which at least twenty demonstrators were killed. When the ironmasters of Nantyglo built defensive towers next to their mansion it was out of genuine fear that their workers might turn upon them.
New towns or elements of them were planned from time to time, as at Tremadog in Merioneth, Aberaeron in Cardiganshire, Bute Town near Rhymney, or the copperworks village of Morriston, Swansea. Probably the largest planned town was Pembroke Dock. Such set pieces were examples of greater investment in buildings of many types. The Georgian style became the preferred architectural language of the period, dominating townscapes from Denbigh to Haverfordwest and Montgomery to Cowbridge as houses, shops and guildhalls were refronted or rebuilt. Its symmetry, proportion and simplicity represented the triumph of Renaissance principles over vernacular traditions. However, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also saw a profusion of architectural fashions, including a pervasive neo-classicism, the first experiments in reviving Gothic architecture in the form of the picturesque ‘gothick’ style, and a brief Egyptian revival.
Landed estates were enriched by agricultural and mineral incomes and colonial trade, and great houses were created according to the latest tastes. Penrhyn Castle near Bangor was designed by Thomas Hopper in a brutal Romanesque style in the 1820s as an expression of vast wealth and conspicuous consumption. Margam Castle was an exercise in gothick in 1830. The most important architect working in Wales was John Nash, who in just a decade from 1788 designed public buildings for the improving Georgian towns and a series of innovative villas for the gentry of south-west Wales in which he learned how to relate buildings to landscape in a Picturesque way. Hundreds of houses were built or rebuilt, many in the Nash style. Although the wealth to be invested in country houses was less in Wales than in many parts of England, there was a notable effect on buildings and the wider landscape. The grounds of many houses were replanned according to the English parkland style and walks and prospects were laid out in accordance with the aesthetics of the Picturesque movement, which had a spiritual home in Wales thanks to the explorations of the Wye valley by William Gilpin and the work of Uvedale Price and of Thomas Johnes. Nash built Emlyn Cottage, a gothick dower house at Newcastle Emlyn, Castle House, a marine villa for Price at Aberystwyth, and the famous Hafod for Johnes. This was the great age of follies, designed to embellish prospects of the landscape: among many that still delight the eye are the Derry Ormond monument in Cardiganshire, the shell grotto at Pontypool Park, and the tower at The Kymin, high above Monmouth.
Houses and grounds like Piercefield on the Wye, Wynnstay on the Dee and Hafod on the Ystwyth became essential visits on the tour of Wales. It may seem ironic that at the same time that Wales was experiencing its Industrial Revolution it became a magnet to early tourists. However, many visitors who sought the magnificent scenery celebrated by the Romantic movement were fascinated by man’s impact on nature in the mining and manufacturing districts. Tourism transformed the architecture of coastal towns, and Aberystwyth, Swansea and Tenby (towns of medieval origin) had become significant seaside resorts by the turn of the nineteenth century. Aberystwyth preserves some fine town houses and an assembly room of this era, and contemporary newspapers list the gentry who visited them. Their presence had an effect on the way that country houses and estates developed. Many saw Wales, with its surviving language, as representing ancient British culture. This was paralleled by a revival of interest among Welsh people in their own past, expressed most notably in the works of Iolo Morganwg, who reinvented Ogam script, the Gorsedd of Bards and the idea of stone circles. It was an excursion into interpreting the past based on invention more than analysis, but it promoted an interest in the ancient monuments of Wales that continues to this day.