The expansion, decline and resurgence of a rural market town
From chocolate-makers to engineers and hi-tech medical designers, Whitland is a bustling place. Richard Youle pays a visit to meet the people who make this rural community tick
ASK some people in Whitland how many hours a week they work, and eyes start rolling. Butcher Colin Harries says 80 hours, pub landlord Mike Adams reckons 100.
Web designers and chocolatemakers Leeann and Barry Smith just laugh.
Nestled in the far west of Carmarthenshire, Whitland is one of 10 rural towns the county council has shortlisted to nurture and revitalise.
The idea is that strong market towns act as glue for surrounding villages, help ensure money made in the county is spent locally, and protect the rural economy and the Welsh language.
A rural affairs task group said 61% of Carmarthenshire’s 186,500 population live in rural areas, nearly double the Welsh average. More people in the county are self-employed than the average and more people with a job work longer hours.
Mr Harries, who runs the London House butchery – one of two such businesses in St John’s Street – said he’s had to extend his opening hours and diversify his offering.
Wine, sauces, marinades and biltong are mixed with more traditional butcher’s cuts.
“Without customers we wouldn’t have a job,” he says. “You’ve got to keep smiling every day.”
More than 100 jobs went when Dairy Crest’s milk factory closed in Whitland in 1994.
“It was tough going,” recalls Mr Harries. “Whitland up until then was a very, very buoyant town.”
A new dairy plant was opened nearby in 2011, but that closed three years later. The town had expanded around the turn of the 20th century due to dairy farming and the growth of the railway, allowing milk to be delivered direct to London.
Mr Harries says Whitland’s location is fantastic and praises its schools with a grin aimed at Julian Kennedy, headteacher at Dyffryn Taf Comprehensive, who happens to be in the shop at the time.
Mr Harries says the town’s commercial web is self-supporting.
“Every good business helps other businesses,” he says.
But the butcher bemoans the closure of NatWest – Whitland’s only bank. Some banking services are provided at the post office in the newsagent opposite. Behind the till is town mayor Barry Chapman and his mother. Mr Chapman’s wife runs the cafe next door while his sister and brother-in-law own two shops nearby.
Like many people, the father-offive says the train station’s central location is a major asset. While in Whitland, whose population is around 2,000, I hear various estimates of the number of businesses. Mr Chapman says it’s more than 125, from selfemployed electricians to builders’ merchants and large-scale engineering firms.
Whitland Engineering services the dairy sector across the UK and also works with the food, drinks and utility industries. Former joint owner John Donovan, who remains an adviser to the company, was the deputy manager of the milk factory when it closed.
“It was a huge event,” he recalls. “It had been there for generations and had developed a highly-skilled workforce.”
Like a number of redundant factory staff, Mr Donovan moved to Whitland Engineering, although his journey a few hundreds yards across town took 12 years while he ran other plants in west Wales.
Mr Donovan says a key milestone for Whitland Engineering was buying the West Street site from Carmarthenshire Council in 2012 and then building a state-of-the-art fabrication workshop, storage facilities and staff training centre.
“We have diversified into electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, automation and civil construction,” says the 60-year-old.
He adds: “The dairy industry is still very important – about a third of our turnover – but we have to go further afield for it.”
Mr Donovan says recruiting such niche skills locally can be tricky – a view shared by Gareth Davies who works at Magstim, which designs and makes medical machines that monitor brain activity and treat depression.
“We’ve got about 90 staff on site – we do the research and development and all the manufacturing here,” says the 43-year-old.
I am led on to the shop floor,
where the company’s transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) machines are being assembled. The highest-spec of these machines sell at just over £80,000 each. Two years ago Magstim provided 35 of them to veterans’ hospitals in the USA.
I am introduced to US-based chief executive officer Lothar Krinke, who says TMS is effective for “treatmentresistant” depression. He says he would like to see more uptake of TMS depression therapy in the UK.
“We are really proud of this,” he says.
The landscape and coastal walks some 20 miles away are a draw for Station House landlord Mr Adams – he of the 100-hour working week.
He and his wife, together with the local vicar, have walked the length of the Pembrokeshire coastal path.
Originally from a brewery family in Bristol, Mr Adams ran a pub in Builth Wells before moving to Whitland 12 years ago.
“We are a pub for the community,” he says. “We open at 9.30am and lots of organisations meet here. It’s a phenomenal place for raising money for charity.
“Everybody helps each other. I think it’s a really nice, caring town. And all the holidaymakers thoroughly enjoy it.”
One Whitland micro-business which is benefiting from an EU funding initiative is Printed Chocolates.
The money has helped Leeann and Barry Smith buy machinery for their food enterprise, which they run from their home in Spring Gardens.
The husband and wife are from Natal in South Africa but moved to the UK with work, before starting a web design business. The chocolate followed.
After becoming a mother, Mrs Smith completed a course to familiarise herself with the chocolatemaking process in the UK.
Her products, as the company’s name suggests, carry all manner of messages and drawings, which are printed directly on to them.
“We get emails and phone calls pretty much every day asking, ‘How do you do it? What machine do you use?’,” says Mrs Smith.
Their lounge is a dedicated production unit, and during a two-week period over Easter they produced nearly 15,000 chocolates.
“Christmas will be manic,” they say.
Getting Printed Chocolates’ name and products out there is hard graft, and with two young children and their other business – W3 Web Designs – to run, time is precious.
“We’re both up at 7am and we work weekends as well,” says Mr Smith, 48. “Some nights I’m working from 10pm to midnight.”
They last visited South Africa in 2011, and their eight-year-old and 11-month-old sons will grow up with Welsh friends. As I leave their house they say Whitland can be hard for outsiders to fit into, although they have their own circle of friends.
The lure of home was part of the reason that born and bred Whitland girl Ffion Scourfield is back in town.
She attended Whitland Primary and then secondary school in Carmarthen before studying accountancy at the former University of Wales Institute Cardiff.
A week after completing her degree she started a job at food wholesaler Castell Howell in Cross Hands.
The 27-year-old lives in Whitland with her partner, golfer Matthew Moseley. Family are close by and her best friend Chloe James lives opposite.
Miss Scourfield says saving for a deposit for a house while renting in Cardiff would have been “impossible”.
“We love city life for the weekend,” says Miss Scourfield. “Here it’s your comfort zone. And it’s a lovely place to live.”
Carmarthenshire has more people aged 65 and over than the Welsh average and fewer aged 16-49, and council chiefs want to encourage young people to stay or come back after studying.
Miss Scourfield, whose first language growing up was Welsh, says several of her schoolfriends have returned to the area.
She has joined Whitland Town Council as a co-opted member and become a governor of the primary school she went to.
“It’s lovely to go back and see how education has changed since I was there,” she says. “There’s more independent learning.”
Town council discussions about dog-fouling, grass-cutting and public toilets have been a bit of an eyeopener, but she adds: “You kind of see how important it is to the town.”
During my Whitland walkabout I hear how business rate relief is a real plus for small enterprises. Miss Scourfield says she would like to see more independent shops in the town.
She says: “I’m a big believer in local businesses.”
She adds: “We’ve got play parks, but I think there is a gap for the 12 to 16-year-old age group. We have got some cracking sports teams, though.”
Bowls, football and cricket are played in Whitland, and the rugby club has a thriving women’s team as well as nurturing the likes of Welsh internationals Mike Phillips, Scott Williams and brothers Jonathan and James Davies in recent years.
“There is a lot of sport in the town,” says Sue Allen, who became county councillor for the area in 2008. “That helps develop young people.”
She lists other facilities and events – the two community halls, the clubs, the annual week of activities to raise funds for Parc Dr Owen, Canolfan Hywel Dda, the town council projects, the public toilets now open 24/7, the carnival – all helping to mesh the town’s fabric together.
“The best thing about Whitland is the community,” says Cllr Allen.
She reckons the rural affairs task group has asked the right questions and talked to the right experts, but that regeneration proposals had to be viable and not rushed through.
She says broadband coverage could be better – a persistent gripe among many rural communities – and her view is that the planning process can be too complicated.
While in Whitland I also catch references to a new hospital proposed by Hywel Dda University Health Board between Narberth to the west and St Clears to the east.
A site has not been chosen, but there has been speculation that land north of Whitland is in the running.
Dyffryn Taf headteacher Mr Kennedy is keen on the idea.
“We are big advocates of the hospital coming to Whitland,” he says. “We have always been open to it.”
Despite only scratching the surface during my visit, I reckon other rural Carmarthenshire towns could learn from Whitland, just as it could perhaps pick up new ideas from them.
But lurking in the background for all of them is the uncertainty about how Brexit will affect agriculture. And will global warming and changing diets start reshaping the wider rural economy?
Cllr Allen’s husband Simon, who is a vet, says: “Farmers just can’t plan ahead. Sentiment is quite negative at the moment.”