MAKING OF A NEW TOWN
KEITH Jefferies was in his mid20s when he rode his motorcycle from the small mining community where he grew up in the south Wales Valleys to a nearby town in search of work.
It was the late 1950s and Keith, who had worked down the mines since leaving school, expected to find little on his journey from Hafodyrynys to Newport, passing through Pontypool on the way.
But as he rode down the historic boundary of Monmouthshire, Keith found the valley was alive with construction activity which seemed to have already produced hundreds of large modern homes.
“I took a motorbike ride down the valley, but I didn’t even know what the valley was,” Keith, now 83, said.
“I didn’t expect to find anything. I came down this valley because I could see a signpost saying Newport.”
Keith had stumbled across early construction work on the new town of Cwmbran, which was being built to provide high-quality homes and commercial space near the villages of Old Cwmbran and Pontnewydd.
New towns, with their modern brutalist architecture, were like nothing people had ever seen before. Public spaces and buildings were constructed mainly from concrete, with wide open roads and plentiful green spaces separating the town’s houses.
Newly married, Keith’s wife had urged him to find another occupation after a few lucky escapes from accidents down the pit.
He found work on that very same day at the Girling brake factory near the town – a major employer at that time – and soon after applied for permanent housing in Cwmbran.
After World War II, the newlyelected Labour government under Clement Attlee embarked on a radical plan to improve and replace poor quality or bombed-out housing across England, Scotland and Wales.
Their aim was to fight back against the blight of urban sprawl and establish new “garden cities”, designed to be self-contained communities surrounded by greenbelt land.
The government’s housing policy, along with the creation of the National Health Service and the expansion of the welfare state, represented a huge effort to combat social inequality at a time when the expense of the war effort added to economic hardship.
The New Towns Act 1946 gave the government power to designate areas as new towns and appoint development corporations who were responsible for their design, construction and management.
Cwmbran was built as the first of only two new towns in Wales, the second being the much smaller Newtown in Powys, which came later.
By the time the programme was effectively wound up in the 1970s, there were more than 20 new towns in England – Milton Keynes, Stevenage and Hemel Hempstead among them – and several in Scotland.
The Cwmbran Development Corporation was established in 1949, with construction on the new town beginning in 1951.
In the early years, much of the development centred on housebuilding in some of the original settlements.
The focus moved later on to the building of the purpose-built town centre with its partially covered shopping precincts and squares.
Many who moved to new towns had come from cramped and worn-out accommodation, or inner-city slums which could be more accurately described as squalid and severely overcrowded.
When Keith Jefferies went to view the property he was offered in the partially-completed Croesyceiliog area, he could scarcely believe his luck.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It was too luxurious. I had come from having a bath in front of the fire once a week if you were lucky.
“We did have showers in the pits but you had no bathrooms in your house. You had no hot and cold water.
“So to come down to Cwmbran and suddenly find you had a lovely inside toilet that you didn’t have to go down the garden to use – we couldn’t believe it.”
The nearby old village of Pontnewydd is where Malcolm Jarrett, 73, grew up.
The new development was on his doorstep throughout his childhood.
“It was quite exciting, I suppose,” he said.
“It meant it was a totally different sort of place – from two villages to becoming quite a large town.
“So as a kid, it was quite exciting to see it all happening and having proper shops in the town centre rather than just the village stores and this sort of thing.”
Malcolm moved to Cwmbran in the early 1970s with his wife, first to a brand-new Cwmbran Corporation house in Coed Eva, and then another in Greenmeadow a few years later.
He was drawn to the area by the vast areas of parks that separated quality affordable housing and the forward-thinking road network. Like many in a similar position, Malcolm and his wife jumped at the opportunity to buy their council house after right-to-buy legislation was passed in the Housing Act 1980.
While the scheme has been widely criticised for reducing social housing stock across the country, it did turn many council tenants into happy homeowners enjoying discounted prices depending on how many years they had lived in the property.
“I would think an awful lot of people bought them, because it was such a good deal,” Malcolm said. “We were paying less in mortgage than we were in rent when we bought it and we obviously had our own property as an investment.
“You can look at the political side of that, whether it was the right thing or the wrong thing to do, but from a financial aspect we would have been crazy not to do it.”
To this day, Cwmbran is still a popular shopping, business and housing destination for many around the south-east region of Wales.
Its shopping centre, with abundant free parking and bus links, has at times got through difficult trading periods better than some of its much larger neighbouring towns and cities.
“The people who planned it did a good job,” Malcolm said. “There’s a green space running right the way through Cwmbran, with playing fields and nice walks along the river and then you have the boating lake.
“There are a lot of good things. Far more good things than bad things about Cwmbran and the town centre itself, I think, is probably one of the most successful shopping areas in the country – possibly because of the decision that was taken to not charge for parking, which is massive.”
He added: “I would say they did a very good job of Cwmbran on the whole.
“I think in any large town you are going to have problems in certain areas, but generally speaking it’s a good place to live.”