UK Setting

South Wales played a fundamental role in the development of the world's first Industrial Revolution and nowhere is this role better illustrated than in the area around Blaenavon.

Here we have one of the finest examples in the world of a landscape created by coalmining and ironmaking in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

When built in 1789, Blaenavon Ironworks with its three blast furnaces was one of the largest ironworks in the world. The rapid industrialisation which followed is still tangible in the extensive landscape which served the ironworks, created by generations of men, women and children who dug coal and iron, quarried limestone, planned primitive railways and canals, and established new communities in this previously barren setting. Later, in 1878, it was at Blaenavon that Sidney Gilchrist Thomas and his cousin, Percy Carlyle Gilchrist, discovered a way of eliminating phosphorus from iron ore to make steel, thus playing a major part in creating the modern world, opening up vast reserves of phosphoric ore to steel production.

Increasing recognition of its extraordinary past is helping to change the perception of our community. This is greatly assisting in the sensitive regeneration of the area which suffered so badly, both economically and socially, following the decline of the iron and coal industries.Our proposals for the area have been developed by a wide partnership of interests in close consultation with local people.