‘My life under the M4’
The M4’s path through Port Talbot is one of the iconic images of south Wales. Thomas Deacon spoke to one man who has a closer view than most...
IT’S hard to imagine a south Wales without the M4. Every day, thousands of people travel along the transport artery that runs across much of England and Wales.
Many of us will probably just trundle along the motorway to get to wherever we need to be without giving the road much thought.
But for some people, it’s not as easy to forget – because part of the motorway is literally in their back garden.
On a quiet street in Port Talbot, where the motorway runs over the town on 45ft-high pillars, lives Malcolm Phillips.
He is 85, and says he has lived on the street longer than anyone else – and he’s never known anything different than having a huge piece of infrastructure as garden furniture.
Father-of-three Malcolm said: “I have lived here since 1960. They had just started building it when we moved in. We were fenced off for a while until they developed the new walls, the back wall was further back about 20 yards then.
“We didn’t notice the work too much, we just worked around it.
“They dug the holes first and then they piledrived and put these metal frames, these rods all tied together, surrounded by planking wood, and they just poured the concrete in.”
Ever since then, a huge pillar that supports part of the M4 has stood at the back of Malcom’s garden.
Sitting in the front room of his house, you can barely hear the sound of near-constant traffic travelling along the motorway.
It’s only when you walk through the house into the long garden that you can hear the constant hum of traffic from far above.
A former steelworker from Pyle, Bridgend, Malcolm said: “We learnt to live it with it, really. You don’t really notice it anymore. It’s not as noisy as some other streets are.
“It can be rather mucky at times, but I think a lot of that problem was from the steelworks when all the smoke pours out. It’s better than it used to be.”
Just a couple of years before Malcolm moved into the home where his children would grow up, Wales’ first motorway was announced – the Port Talbot bypass. It was the first part of what would become the M4.
Back then in 1953 it wasn’t easy building a motorway, and it wasn’t until 1966 that the 4.5-mile-long stretch opened. It helped cut the journey time between Swansea and Cardiff by 20 minutes.
At the time, the Western Mail produced a six-page supplement to mark its opening, dubbing the flyover a “£5m miracle” and claimed that it would become “one of the sights of Wales”.
Other parts of the M4 were already being built, before the Severn Bridge was finished in 1966 and the Newport bypass completed in 1967. The remaining sections of the M4 were gradually finished over the following 25 years.
In 1977, 30 miles were completed and the Western Mail concluded it had been “the most momentous year for road building in South Wales since the Romans left”.
When it first opened, the motorway actually drastically cut congestion – a problem that motorists today will be all too familiar with if they use the route.
Malcolm said: “The volume of cars over the years has increased immensely, so we’ve just had to put up with that.
“You just learn to live with it.” He added: “At around teatime and early morning, with people going to work, it’s just a crawl.
“You see all the big wagons, you
One year we had particularly bad snow and a snowplough going through just threw a lot of snow over – it cracked a bathroom window and chipped a bit of the bath...
MALCOLM PHILLIPS
see just the tops of them, they’re going so slow.”
When Malcolm and his wife Pamela moved into their home in 1960, they knew that part of the motorway would be built in the garden.
Work took place over several years and the couple did receive some compensation.
Malcolm said: “It didn’t put us off, really, we just looking for a home and we went for it and we spent quite a long time here then.”
They raised their family and enjoyed a happy life, before Pamela sadly died in 2005 just 18 months before they were due to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary.
Malcolm, a grandfather-of-two, said: “We brought a family up in here. Bringing up a family here was fine, the little ones didn’t notice.
“My wife died in 2005. I miss her very much.”
One of his two sons, Paul, who had driven along the M4 from his home in Brighton to visit his dad, said they just didn’t know any different growing up.
Paul, 47, said: “We only realised later that it was any different.
“It was great having the space underneath it to skateboard and play when we were kids, though.”
The walls either side of the motorway were built higher to increase safety – but not before one incident in the 1980s in which snow was flung from the motorway into Malcolm’s garden.
He said: “One year we had particularly bad snow and a snow-plough going through just threw a lot of snow over – and in fact it cracked a bathroom window and chipped a bit of the bath.
“And people in the lane were taking snow off their cars and then this snow all come over.”
The noise of the traffic is easy to forget, and Malcolm said he spends a lot of time in the garden he built himself – complete with a fish pond.
If it’s an especially hot day, Malcolm parks up in the lane behind his house, using the motorway as a huge sun shade.
Malcolm said: “Some friends and family do say, ‘How do you live with that in your back garden?’
“But I just say you learn to live with it, like you learn to live in a lot of places.”
For Malcolm and his neighbours, it’s just part of the furniture.