Tag: Swansea
Greening Swansea: a forgotten pioneer
Greening cities and towns, we might imagine, is a contemporary concern – a response to the realisation that we’re rapidly destroying the earth’s environment and depleting its non-human lifeforms. Swansea has its share of green activists and agitators working to raise awareness and press for action. It would be fair to say, though, that those […]
Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn, selenophotographer
If you visit the Penllergare Valley Woods, as we did last week, you can’t leave without developing a strong respect for the estate’s chief creator, John Dillwyn Llewelyn. Photographic pioneer, astronomer, botanist, orchid collector, landscapist, inventor – he used his wealth, leisure and connections, after inheriting the estate as a boy from his grandfather in […]
Swansea automatic
I first came across the name Rhys Trimble last month while wandering down a narrow lane from the castle to the main street in Denbigh. At the bottom of Lôn Brombil (Broomhill Lane) a poem by him, ‘Moliant i Ddinbych’, is painted on the wall of a building. It begins ‘Boreon Dafydd; o ael bryn […]
Black boys
On the way to give a talk in Killay Library in Swansea last week I passed a pub I remembered seeing before. It struck me as odd the first time. Not because of its building or location, but because of its name – The Black Boy. Years ago such a name might not have raised […]
The Londonification of Cardiff
It’s a commonplace that the UK has the least well-balanced economy in Western Europe. While London and its region, dominated by financial and allied services, continue to grow and thrive, the rest of the country is bogged in post-industrial depression, suffering still from the effects of George Osborne’s planned ‘austerity’ (still very much with us, […]
Why isn’t visual art a big thing in Wales?
How healthy are the visual arts in Wales? Not just in the sense of how many or how good are the artists, but other, more contextual questions, such as: How are they valued? How are they supported? How are artists encouraged and trained? How are the arts used to bring new life to depressed communities? […]
Wales Coast Path, day 13: Swansea to Mumbles
This may be Day 13 in the geographical series, but chronologically it’s number 95 – Sunday 9 September 2018, and the very last stage of our Wales Coast Path journey. We‘ve left our ‘home stretch’, one of the flattest in the whole course of the Path, till last. It’s a route – along the track […]
Men come together to make a man
I was wandering absently through the galleries of the Glynn Vivian the other day, trying, unsuccessfully, to remember what the Welsh word for ‘unflattering’ might be, when I stopped suddenly in front of a Japanese print. It was in one of the rooms devoted to the gallery’s founding collection, which once belonged to Richard Glynn […]
Frank Brangwyn’s British Empire Panels
1 Introduction Most Swansea people are familiar with the British Empire Panels. Many sitting through a dull patch in a concert in the Brangwyn Hall will have turned to ponder Frank Brangwyn’s enormous work. In a few months’ time the Panels will get more exposure, as Marc Rees’s performance piece Nawr yr arwr / Now […]
Swansea’s rebel women
For all their strengths in the campaign to gain votes for women Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were by nature autocratic. In 1907 some members of their Women’s Social and Political Union took exception to their announcement that the WSPU’s annual conference would be cancelled in future and that they themselves and their inner circle would […]
