First Impressions of Blaenymaes Or: Why Seagulls Fly Upside Down Over Bardsey Avenue
Our family moved from the terraces of Wern Fawr Road to Blaenymaes, Swansea, in 1962. Someone once told me that seagulls fly upside down over Blaenymaes because the place isnât worth shitting on.
Harsh, perhaps, but if you read the statistics about the area today, you might think they werenât far off. Itâs often listed among the most deprived places in Wales, reportedly in the bottom 10%. Crime figures from 2023 suggest itâs statistically more prone to crime than around 75â80% of UK streets, and 41% of the population is officially described as âeconomically inactiveâ, which is just council-speak for being on the dole, as we used to say.
But thatâs not the Blaenymaes I remember arriving in.
Coming from Port Tennant, the estate seemed positively posh. It looked clean and prosperous, and the people seemed to be thriving. When I first saw our new house on Bardsey Avenue, I was impressed. It was probably built in the 1950s, part of the post-war push to build proper council housing. So in 1962, it still looked modern, even a bit luxurious by the standards we were used to.
We had three bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a small extra room we called the Annex. More cultured people might call it a cloakroom. And the crown jewel: it had coal-fired central heating, with radiators in every room. There was a decent front, side, and back garden, and best of all â an indoor toilet. No more freezing our arses off in the winter or relying on piss-pots tucked under the bed.
Weâd come from Wern Fawr Road, an older, grubbier part of Swansea, hemmed in by railway lines, the docks, and the Carbon Black factory that painted everything downwind a murky shade of industrial soot. The houses there were likely privately rented and in need of serious modernisation, even by 1950s standards. As I mentioned elsewhere, there was only one car on our whole street, a Hillman Minx owned by Mr Vincent.
Bardsey Avenue, by contrast, was a revelation. There were loads of cars, which to my 8-year-old eyes meant one thing: weâd moved into a rich neighbourhood. These people had money, or so I thought. Of course, I now realise they were just hard-working families whoâd scraped and saved to afford a modest vehicle.
To me, back then, they looked like easy marks.
We moved in and began to reconnoitre.