GILFACH GOCH, GARDEN VILLAGES AND ARCHITECTS

It is strange the things that you hold in your memory. Many years ago, when a university student, I had a Christmas job working for the post in the sorting office. Parcels would arrive from all over the country and my job involved placing these parcels into bags for the appropriate delivery area. Obviously, Maesteg went into ‘Maesteg’ and Merthyr went into ‘Merthyr’. What I remember was asking someone “Where does Gilfach Goch go?” “Gilfach Goch – ‘Porth’; remember it by the rhyme.” While I was wondering about the assonance of the two words he says, “Really it should be Gilfach Goch Garden Village.” Somehow the idea of a garden village in the valleys always intrigued me and so all these years later an occasional memory pops up and insists on a wander up that way.

Garden villages arose out of The Garden City movement which developed from the French Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier’s ideas of 1808. He promoted the notion of an ideal community with homes, farms and factories all laid out in a way to offer everyone the opportunity to engage in open spaces and cooperate in industry and leisure. The ideas were taken up by Ebenezer Howard in Britain in 1898 when he called the garden city, “the peaceful path to reform”. This approach was clearly in opposition to Britain's crowded conurbations and the piecemeal development that was occurred around large scale industrial activity.

Garden City and its surrounding area

 

Garden City - a section of roads

The ideas were taken up by Arts and Crafts architects in such places as Port Sunlight and Bournville, where they were sponsored by the employers of the workers who made the soap and the chocolate. In looking at these houses it is easy to see a middle-class intelligentsia conception of working-class housing. The layout was of low-density buildings with the backs of the houses forming an internal quadrangle. There were wide streets, central ‘village greens’, shopping parades and community buildings for schools and halls. Such designs were seen in England in Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, with the smaller Welsh example being the garden village of Rhiwbina, designed by the architects Mottram and Unwin. The ideas of the movement influenced town planning for a considerable period of time.

So to Gilfach Goch to see what kind of garden village is there. The route to follow is west along the M4 leaving to go north toward Llantrisant. Now the road runs along the River Ely then near Tonyrefail turn to the west into the Ogwr Valley.  In the distant geological past, the Ely river would have continued northward with the Rhondda Fach and Fawr as its headwaters. But the Taff worked back and claimed the waters of the Rhondda Valleys to take them to Cardiff. The Ogwr Fach which flows through Gilfach Goch would also have joined the Ely but at some point it too changed its mind about its destination and turned southwest to join the waters that find the sea at Ogmore.

I pass a sign telling me that I am in Gilfach Goch which is in the borough of Rhondda Cynon Taf. Porth does not appear anywhere so perhaps the post office have now changed their delivery routes. I turned up the valley with no hint or signage of a garden village and certainly no arts and crafts looking houses or buildings. I now pass a sign telling me that I’m entering Evanstown in Bridgend County Borough. There is only really one road in and out of this valley and the few terraced streets of Evanstown appear just on the one side. By slavishly keeping to the line of the river, the vagaries of local boundary construction have neglected both the river’s prior fluvial affiliation and as well as the social 

Evanstown  - from Gilfach Goch

geographical necessities of Evanstown and placed it not in its natural community of the Ogwr Fach cul de sac valley but instead it has been commandeered by the local authority over the hills and sits as some kind of Bridgend enclave with different offices for pensioners to get their bus passes, different days and lorries for rubbish collection and sometimes slightly different school holidays. 

I look at the Evanstown Community Centre, formerly Bethania Independent Chapel built in 1846 reconstructed in 1925, and now beneath its pediment its own unusual relief of children at play.  Very colourful and different from the chapel days.

Evanstown Community Centre

Evanstown Community Centre Relief

A Peter’s Pie van-man chats to me about the building and importantly he tells me where I can get a cup of coffee later. I carry on along the west side of the valley presumably leaving Bridgend at some point and re-entering RCT but except by the thin stream of the Ogwr Fach shepherded by a constructed channel there is no indication of the formal presence of the boundary. Near the top of the valley, the road turns and comes back down the eastern side with the terraced rows forming another part of Gilfach Goch, there being no garden village in sight. I end up back where I started, consult the map and find I missed the ‘garden village’ early on. It is several roads all named after trees. The layout does not follow the framework of Garden City planning of using contours and buildings linked by large open spaces. It is mainly parallel roads of now considerably altered pairs of smallish semi-detached houses with many cars and a few caravans parked outside. 

Gilfach Goch  - Beech Street

There are no obvious public buildings and the open spaces are just the naturalness where the houses stop and the valley countryside begins.  As I look a car draws up and a young woman gets out managing both her toddler and her shopping. I walk to the end of the road and over the back I see another woman coming out of her conservatory and putting out the washing. The day is overcast, damp and cold. another lady comes out of the house next door, "Hopeful aren't you?" she says to her neighbour. I gaze at the view from the end of the street and a man approaches with a walking stick and with it points at the wind turbines inhabiting the tops of the hills, "Ugly things, aren't they?". I ask him where the community centre cafe is and he directs me back to the main road.

Gilfach Goch Garden Village - the houses in the middle of the valley

I drive to the modernish building which houses keep fit classes, creches, and the cafe. Outside an information board provides some history declaring that Gilfach Goch is recognised as being the inspiration for the village in Richard Llewellyn's 1939 novel, ‘How Green was my Valley’. On the board there is also some history of mining in the area, noting how a colliery manager developed an interest in fossils of the coal measures and gave a collection of over 20,000 specimens to the National Museum of Wales.

The board also tells me how the area became the first venture of the Welsh Garden Cities Ltd when it built Gilfach Garden Village between 1910 and 1914. What the board doesn’t tell me is that this company was led by the architect W. Beddoe Rees and was closely allied to the Powell Duffryn mining company. Although this housing company followed the lead of those set up with a supposedly philanthropic motivation, such as that of coal owner Davis Davies, their standards were far less than that used in other Garden City estates as the build quality was far lower than other places and their appearance does not follow the usual garden village aesthetic. 

Gilfach Goch Garden Village - Beech Street

The architect W. Beddoe Rees has an interesting history. He was born in Maesteg and he initially specialised in designing chapels. Perhaps his choice was deliberate because he was well placed to take advantage of the last surge of chapel building, following the 1904-5 Christian Revival in Wales. Amongst the chapels he designed were; Mount Zion English Baptist, Blaengarw (1904), Van Road Congregational, Caerphilly (1903), St. John's Wesleyan Methodist, Llandrindod Wells (1907), Ebeneser Welsh Wesleyan Methodist, Llandudno (1909), and Bethania Welsh Baptist, Maesteg (1908). However at some point he worked out that business was moving in a different direction and he established Welsh Garden Cities Ltd., the organisation which built "garden villages" in several of the industrial valleys of South Wales, including Gilfach Goch and also Cefn Hengoed. The essential features of these estates were that they were commissioned by Powell Dyffryn and that they did not follow the ubiquitous terraced housing of the valleys. During WW1, Beddoe Rees worked for the Ministry of Munitions with responsibilities for canteens and 'welfare' schemes for the workers making shells, guns and bombs. He was knighted for this in 1917. Following the war his business interests expanded into shipping and collieries, and by the early 1920s he was a very wealthy man. Early in his career he had been commissioned to 'gothicise' the 18th century farmhouse of Ty Mynydd in Radyr, a house with eleven bedrooms, a large library and over 5 acres of grounds. Mr and Mrs Dahl, Roald’s parents bought the house in 1918 and the author described it in his book in Boy: “a mighty house with turrets on its roof and with majestic lawns and terraces all around it. There were many acres of farm and woodland, and a number of cottages for the staff….” Following the death of the father in 1920 the Dahl’s moved out so with his previous knowledge Beddoe Rees bought Ty Mynydd off them and went on to construct a 6 hole golf course in the grounds. The house was demolished in 1967 and a modern housing estate of an upmarket variety was built on the site.

Ty Mynydd, Radyr

W. Beddoe Rees went into politics and became the Liberal M.P. for Bristol South, from 1922 to 1929. He consistently displayed his political orientation of being fiercely opposed to Labour and socialist ideas and took the opportunity of his maiden parliamentary speech to oppose a Bill designed to establish a minimum wage for coal miners. Miners whose wages were paying for the houses he had built. In 1930 he was made bankrupt when the Official Receiver stated that he had ‘engaged in rash and hazardous speculation and unjustifiable extravagance in living’. An extravagance beyond the reach of the worshippers of the Bethania’s of this world and a different life to those inhabiting the houses of Beech Street, Oak Street, Wood Street, etc., Gilfach Goch. 
“Rhymes with Porth.”