LOWRY AND BARGOED

Visiting Bargoed always brings to mind the artist L. S. Lowry. He came to the South Wales valleys on several occasions and produced a number of works. He was brought by a friend who lived in the area. His painting of Bargoed is now in ‘The Lowry’ gallery in Salford.  

It depicts the town in a grey green evening light dominated by the coal tip to its south. Indeed, for those of us familiar with the place we recognise it as a tip because we know it was there, but now it has been removed and the area is now known as a country park - ‘Parc Coetir Bargod’ - translated as Bargoed’s woodland park. It’s not so much a woodland at the moment but has the look of an area of large shrubs and small trees that we have come to recognise as the flora that covers old tips. This particular tip painted by Lowry has a claim to fame in that it was the largest man made colliery tip in Europe.  At one time it stood as a testament to labours being undertaken underground but now landscaping has softened out and removed the monument and with it Bargoed’s claim to fame. Lowry’s painting also removes this knowledge of the spoils of industry and the view not of a ‘tip’ but simply a flat-top conical hill standing in a similar manner to the spiritual tor at Glastonbury.  Glastonbury being a location to which pilgrims came to pay homage as an important pagan and Christian site. The only pilgrimages that made it to Bargoed were to pay respect to King Coal. Only Wanderers and memory makers now cross the lines of reverence to the tip at Bargoed. 

Lowry’s view of the area suggests the way in which a human shaped spoil heap is also a part of a scenery devoid of the trappings of industrial creation. Lowry’s painting naturally forges the link between an industrial landscape, its underlying history and the ground on which it stands. He was able to see that in Wales there is a way in which nature is still larger than the havoc that men have inflicted upon us. Industry as undoubtedly scarred and altered the scenery but these intrusions into the natural habitat can be shaken off.

Lowry captures a feature always present in the valleys, town and country are one place; the boundaries between the two are everywhere and indeed defy definition as boundary. Lowry's other works on the valleys pick up this theme and point to the mystical past in a way that open land and human tenancy of that land are intertwined. His painting of ‘Hillside in Wales’, now in the Tate Britain Museum, places the valley houses as if they are a Celtic hill fort with terraces and earth mounds setting out a place of safety. 

In reading psychogeographers of Britain there is strong tendency towards Englishness. But the English identity is one that goes back only to the 11th Century, our Welsh identity goes back way beyond this to earlier tribes and inhabitants of these islands. In this painting, Lowry points to our ancient battles and struggles of this place which merge into the struggles and battles undertaken in order to survive and live well.  

Lowry was noted as being cynical about authority, an attitude which undoubtedly matched that of the local residents. The painting of Bargoed was at one time seen in the town when placed on exhibition in the library in the late 1980s. The myth developed, but some say it is true, that the police would remove the painting every night to ensure that it was not stolen. Whether Lowry would have approved of this we will never know but we can only wonder at what the thieves have really taken from Bargoed.