Brynmawr

History

Prior to the Industrial Revolution and the founding of Brynmawr, a settlement called Gwaun Helygen (meaning 'marsh of the willows') sat on a small area of moorland on the border between the counties of Monmouthshire and Brecknockshire. The village consisted of a few scattered farmhouses, a slew of small tram roads that led to the surrounding coal deposits, a staging inn, and a turnpike road from Abergavenny to Merthyr Tydfil which crossed through the bleak upland plateau. With the development of Nantyglo ironworks under Crawshay Bailey in the early 19th century, suitable housing was needed for the workers, and thus the area of upland home to Gwaun Helygen was chosen as an ideal area for a settlement. Houses began to spring up around the tram roads and the turnpike road, and the town began to rapidly grow. Although the settlement was not home to any heavy industry, and was for the most part a dormitory town, several above-ground ore deposits outside of the town were worked on, and a few underground levels were eventually dug beneath Brynmawr. However, as early as the 1870s, many of the resources that were once considered abundant had been exhausted, and the local industry began to decline. As the town's residents practically solely relied on the surrounding industries, many of them left the town in search of employment, and Brynmawr witnessed a sharp drop in population. The town's market hall, now the Market Hall Cinema, was built in 1894, and replaced the older town hall built in 1844. By the time of the Great Depression, most of the town's population were unemployed, which attracted the attention of a group of Quakers, whose work in the town to relieve unemployment culminated in the Brynmawr Experiment. In 1952, Jim Forrester of Enfield Cables Ltd opened a factory…