The history of Swansea changed dramatically in 1716 when John Lane arrived in the town, from Bristol, to supervise the erection of a copper-smelting works in the Lower Swansea Valley. Several geographical features attracted Lane to the site. With 18 tonnes of coal being required to produce just one ton of copper, it was cheaper to build a smelting works amid already established working coal mines than to have the coal transported to the site and Swansea Valley had some of the richest and easily surface-mined coal seams in the country. The River Tawe, which ran through the heart of the valley, also allowed easy access to the port and then, via the Bristol Channel, to England and beyond to the developing nations of the whole world. Lane's Llangyfelach copper works was the first of 14 such sites and heralded Swansea as one of the leading players of the Industrial Revolution.
Within a century of John Lane's arrival, Swansea was a radically changed town. Its history as an agricultural centre was ruined as tin and steel, gold and silver, even arsenic production joined that of copper-smelting - their blast furnaces turning the town sky a sulphuric hell-like orange and their poisonous residues destroying the environment to such a degree that even today certain area in the valley remain sterile.
Today, these industries lay long dead in the Lower Swansea Valley. For years, the site of these once great and historic manufacturing works sat derelict and ugly, its landscape scarred with molten rock and ore - like the scene of an extinguished Hades. But with a huge land reclamation program and the area being designated as Britain's first Enterprise Zone in 1981, new factories and retail traders were encouraged into the valley and today employment flourishes there again.
Copperopolis
