Valley Communities

What sort of places were the new communities of the South Wales valleys? Many of you reading this Web site, who live in the South Wales valleys know well enough just how different valley communities look compared to other areas. If you have travelled around South Wales then you will also know that to some extent every valley is different. However, we can start by looking at two pieces of evidence which give a fairly accurate view of the appearance of valley from the report of a Government commission in 1917.

All other British coalfields have fairly level or gently undulating (wavy)  surfaces. In South Wales the coalfield used to be spoken of as the "hills" but of more recent years "the valleys" . They are for the most part extremely narrow, with inconveniently steep sides, some of them indeed being so narrow at some points that there is scarcely space enough on the level for main road and railway in addition to the river itself. Nevertheless, it is into these valleys, shut in on either side by high mountains that the mining population is crowded, and it is in this same narrow space, and often right in the midst of the dwelling houses that the surface works of the collieries ... have been placed . . . Streets run along the length of the valleys in monotonous terraces, instead of radiating from a common centre.

The density of population in the valley Communities was extremely high. In 1911 in the Rhondda, for example, 23,680 people were crammed on average into each square mile where  houses had been built. This was by far the highest density in England and Wales, where the average was 618 people per square mile. To set against this, however, it is important to remember that surrounded as they were by mountains, the valley communities of South Wales were much nearer to open countryside than was the case in other industrial areas of Britain