Vanished Wales: Places Lost In Living Memory
by Carwyn Jones
Genres: History, Non-fictionPages: 180
Rating:
Synopsis:Vanished Wales: Places Lost in Living Memory is the book to accompany one of ITV Wales’ most popular shows. It explores the fascinating stories of lost landmarks: places in Wales that have disappeared from towns, cities and villages within living memory. As in the series, the book shines a spotlight on this missing heritage, featuring stories from local people who still have a deep personal connection with the remarkable sights that were once on their doorstep.
Lost communities, hives of industry, popular public buildings, cultural and sporting venues, wartime placements, Victorian superstructures and even entire villages: these are once prominent places that have been wiped off the map. Including before and after images from the show, Vanished Wales sings their epitaph.
Carwyn Jones’ Vanished Wales is based on an ITV series I haven’t seen, but I don’t think you need to have seen the series to get something out of it. It focuses not on ancient history, but on Welsh touchstones and homes that have vanished in the last seventy years or so. Some of them are still floating in awareness even for me, despite being destroyed before I was born — and my parents certainly remember them. Others are a bit more obscure.
Given the brief, I was surprised at the exclusion of the obvious target: Capel Celyn, the village drowned to create a reservoir in order to send water to, I kid you fucking not, Liverpool. Yes, you read that right: Liverpool. For industry, to be clear. Perhaps that was still a tad too raw and political for the series? It touches a little bit on local politics, and on people who don’t live in the villages and so on deciding the fate of them, but maybe Capel Celyn still provokes too much anger for ITV. Who knows?
It’s full of photographs (some necessarily old/poor quality, since there’s nothing there to photograph now) and little testimonials/anecdotes/memories from people who lived in/near the vanished places. An interesting read, even if it felt somewhat milquetoast given the impact English industrial aspirations had on Welsh places.
Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)
I have been intrigued by the idea of Wales and would love to visit some day.
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I can definitely recommend! For me it’s my family’s home of course (even if I grew up in England), but when I was at university in Cardiff I had the chance to show people around a bit sometimes, and there are so many things to do/see. I highly recommend Castell Coch and St Fagan’s, for instance.
I like the idea of the book, thanks for sharing your thoughts
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It was definitely pretty cool to see, even if I felt there were some startling omissions!
Sounds like an interesting book! But also… definitely a bit of a mild take if they left out something that shocking (and arguably thus extremely important to include)!
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I wonder if maybe people from Capel Celyn weren’t super interested in talking about it something — and to remember it they’d probably be in their 70s… But still, I’m sure you should be able to do something with archive photos and testimony from e.g. those whose family graves were (or weren’t) moved.