Alun Seward, David Swidenbank Pontypridd Through Time

Annotation

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.