Pontypridd Through Time
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€19.99
Pontypridd Through Time portrays the history of this iconic market town that sits at the gateway to three historic valleys of the South Wales coalfield. It also illustrates some of the changes that have contributed across centuries to the everyday life of a place that transformed from pastoral, drovers' river-crossing into a town that embodied a thriving conduit to capitalist mineral prospecting on a prodigious scale. A hamlet transformed from its rural obscurity in the eighteenth century to ride the wild, mechanical horses of the industrial fuel revolution to become a bustling market town. A town encapsulating all the excesses of the saga of the South Wales' coal and railway bonanza. It survives into the twenty-first century - to outlast the pits that gave it life and reared it. Pontypridd today - fighting back to rise again.
Alun Seward, a semi-retired estate agent, was born and bred in Rhondda. Although he has lived for over 25 years in Radyr on the outskirts of Cardiff, he has a great love of Rhondda and its heritage and feels it should be celebrated. An aspiring novelist, he wrote all the text for this book. He has two children and four grandchildren. David Swidenbank is a freelance writer and photographer. He trained at Documentary Photography at Newport Art School in the late Seventies and has contributed to several magazines including Family History and Ancestor. He is currently studying for a B.A. in photographic studies, and has several photos exhibited at The Wales Millennium Centre. He has lived in Porthcawl for nearly twenty years.