South Wales Valleys Homes

When pits were sunk in South Wales after 1840, the first houses of the new mining communities were also built. These were often little more than the wooden huts, or three-roomed cottages. In 1878 a survey was made of houses built at Merthyr Vale by the coal owners Nixon, Taylor, Cory and Company. Here is part of this survey:

At Nixonville are the best houses. Built of brick ... they contain 6 rooms and are chiefly occupied by the Overmen, firemen and best workmen . . . The cost was about Ł 150 per house ... At Cardiff Road ... all built of stone ... cost about Ł100 each ... 5 rooms, 2 on the ground floor and 3 bedrooms ... The manager and under-managers houses cost Ł423 . . ' Altogether the amount expended by the firm in erecting cottages at Merthyr Vale up to the present time is Ł22,089 which equals about Ł 105 per house. The rents received from 1869 to 1877 equal Ł3,202 ...

In fact very few Colliery Companies in South Wales themselves built houses, as Coal owners preferred to leave this task to private builders. Using stone quarried locally these ‘speculative' builders quickly constructed a large number of houses-16,000 in the Rhondda alone between 1881 and 1914.

Typical valleys fireplace Although these houses were of a better standard than these which had been built in the iron making towns of South Wales a century earlier, little thought was given to overall planning as the terraces snaked their way down the valleys to become one of the unique things about the area's appearance.

Many of these new houses were rented (either from the Company or private landlords) but there was a very high percentage of home ownership in the South Wales valleys-as much as 60% in some areas and in the anthracite valleys even higher. A popular way for miners to raise the money to buy their houses was through what were known as Building Clubs and here is an account of how these operated:

A number of miners club together and with the assistance of a secretary ... arrange for a large number of houses to be built in one contract. Each member pays from Ł 1 0 to Ł20 down and thereafter monthly installments of from 10s to 25s for each "share", that is, house. When about one-fourth of the cost of each has been paid in, the club "divides", and each member takes over his house, which is allotted him by ballot, subject to a mortgage which he can pay off gradually ... To meet the claims of these clubs men have had to save large sums from their wages to pay for the cost of their houses over a series of from 15 to 25 years, the usual rate of contribution being at the rate of from 15s. to 24s. per month.

This account by a woman from Llwynypia shows you how the pit dominated the life of the miner's wife:

Particularly in large households where many men were employed on different shifts, must have made it seem that miners were always either going to or coming back from work. The 'working day' of the house was thus a very long one and it was also true that in many houses beds were never empty because of the shift system. The piecework system of wages meant that the amount of money coming into the house was never predictable and of course there was always the dreaded fear of a husband or a son being brought home dead or injured. Perhaps the clearest example of how the pit intruded into the home was the case of bathing. There were no pithead baths in South Wales during this period, so once the miner returned from the pit his first task was to take a bath. Below a photograph and a written account by a miner, show how this was arranged. bottom part of your body ... you'd get the women from next door ... they'd come in here and they'd sit down in the kitchen and they wouldn't move-when even you were washing the bottom part of your body.

Despite the tremendous amount of house building which went on, it could not keep pace with immigration into the mining valleys and there was always a shortage of housing. This also led to overcrowding. In 1911 in the Rhondda an average of 6 people lived in each house and this was much higher than the average for industrial areas in the rest of Britain. Some houses had 13 people living in them and many had 10 or more people. It was very common for lodgers to be taken in because of this shortage of housing and because their rent helped with family finances, and this obviously added to the overcrowding.