Going nowhere... our unused roads
THEY say “all roads lead to Rome”, but these Welsh roads might just disprove that because they lead pretty much nowhere at all.
With nearly 22,000 miles of carriageway winding its way through the valleys, towns, cities and green fields of Wales you might miss these often hidden roads with no destination dotting the landscape.
And if you were to find yourself on one of them it might bring to mind the lyrics of the classic song Road to Nowhere by Talking Heads, or maybe even Road to Hell by Chris Rea
Your journey on these roads would not last very long, however, as Wales’s “roads to nowhere” have either never been completed, fallen into disuse, or the developments they were supposed to connect to have never been built.
Here are two of them in and around Swansea . . .
The very short road leading to a hamlet no-one lives in
The cluster of whitewashed eco-homes at Coed Darcy, Llandarcy, was built in 2013 as part of a 25-year vision for a £1.2bn 4,000-home ‘urban village’ with 10,000 residents and four schools.
The pretty cottages line a gently curving street and there is a community hall and even some ponds at the site. However, the quaint cottages have stood empty, with no residents, no electricity or water and no connecting roads.
Built on the site of the old BP oil refinery, the homes stand out in an isolated landscape silently waiting for the day they might be occupied and are only connected to the rest of the world by a single dirt track.
Planning permission for a relief road from Coed Darcy to Jersey Marine was granted in 2008 but it is yet to be completed except for a small square of carriageway that ends abruptly.
The proposed road would include a viaduct over the protected Crymlyn Bog and an underpass at nearby Pen Isa’r Coed Farm, before joining Ffordd Amazon near Fabian Way in Swansea.
It was designed to relieve traffic from the Jersey Marine link road and provide a direct route from the development to Swansea city centre.
There are no plans to complete the road to Coed Darcy at the moment, even though a signpost has been installed pointing the direction that the planned road might run one day.
The road leading to a huge retail park with only one tenant
Millions of pounds were spent on Parc Felindre, just off junction 46 of the M4, in the hope of attracting dozens of new businesses to the site.
However, if you come off the motorway hoping to visit a dynamic business space you will be sorely disappointed as there remains only one tenant, a DPD depot, years after the site was rebranded as a “strategic business park”.
Once home to a tinplate works which was shut and demolished in the 1990s, the space was used to host the 2006 National Eisteddfod and then a park and ride service.
The future of the site was raised at a Swansea Council scrutiny panel meeting in September 2020, when Swansea Liberal Democrat leader Cllr Chris Holley said the business park had been vacant for many years prior to DPD’S arrival.
“I feel that whatever marketing has been done is incredibly poor,” he said, questioning whether major schemes like the Aston Martin production centre at St Athan were made aware of Parc Felindre as an option.
Council property development manager Huw Mowbray said a review of the marketing strategy was taking place with the agents involved, adding that the site was ready for occupation.
“I guess (with) the marketing strategy, we do need to review and have a discussion with the agents and see what the best way forward is.
“Is it them or is it somebody else?” he said.