Blaenavon means head of the river, or river's source, in Welsh. It sits high on a hillside at the place where the Afon Lwyd actually begins, and that elevation tells you most of what you need to know. The town was not built where farms had been or where trade routes crossed. It was built where the iron was. In 1788 three businessmen from the West Midlands invested £40,000 in three blast furnaces on Lord Abergavenny's empty hills, and a town arrived to feed them. Population in 1800: a little over a thousand. Population at its 1890 peak: above 20,000. Population today: 6,055. The arc of every Welsh valley town in three numbers.
Thomas Hill, his partner Thomas Hopkins, and Benjamin Pratt opened the ironworks in 1788. Hopkins ran Cannock Wood Forge in Staffordshire and knew exactly the kind of skilled men a new ironworks needed, so he poached them and brought their families with him. The streets of Blaenavon filled in a particular order: the works first, then the cottages closest to the works, then St. Peter's Church in 1804 (gifted to the parish by Hill and Hopkins themselves), then the school Sarah Hopkins built in 1815 in memory of her brother Samuel, then everything else. In 1836 Robert William Kennard formed the Blaenavon Coal and Iron Company, which expanded into Big Pit and into rail manufacture. Rails stamped Blaenavon, dated 1886, were eventually found in Sweden, evidence of how far the town's output traveled before the works closed in 1900.
Blaenavon House, the mansion Samuel Hopkins built for himself around 1798, has lived more lives than most buildings. It started as the iron master's residence, looking down at the works that paid for it. In 1924 it was repurposed as a cottage hospital, supported by weekly subscriptions from the local iron and coal workers, the kind of mutual-aid arrangement Welsh mining towns invented because no one else would do it. The hospital ran until 1985. After that the building became a nursing home until 2007, then was simply abandoned. Vandals stripped the lead from the roof and the slates from above it. The original interiors went. A 2016 fire wrecked the ballroom wing. By then Blaenavon House was on the Buildings at Risk register, but in 2017 private owners bought it and began restoring it as a family home, which is roughly what it was when Thomas Hopkins finished building it in 1798.
The ironworks shut in 1900. The Big Pit hung on until 1980. Between those two dates the town's population fell census by census. Some of that was emigration to other valley towns or out of Wales altogether, but a surprising amount was simply a falling birth rate, families having fewer children because they could see what was coming. By 1961 the population was 8,451. After the pit closed in 1980 the decline accelerated. The town lost its passenger trains too: Blaenavon High Level station shut in 1941 and the last train from Blaenavon Low Level ran to Newport in April 1962. Documents declassified later showed the Low Level line was axed not because it lacked riders but because the Newport area's track was congested by the newly opened Llanwern steelworks. Iron in, iron out, the cycle complete and the small town's branch line sacrificed to the bigger one.
In 2003, in a deliberate echo of Hay-on-Wye across the border, Welsh writers and publishers and the local council tried to remake Blaenavon as Wales' second book town. New bookshops opened. Festivals were planned. It did not work. The town was remote, Hay was already established, and visitors were not going to drive past Hay to reach a competitor up a steeper hill. The bookshops mostly closed. What did work, oddly, came in the same period from a completely different direction: in 2000, UNESCO had inscribed the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape as a World Heritage Site, the first cultural landscape so designated in the United Kingdom. The Big Pit reopened as a national coal museum. The ironworks became a destination in itself. Visitors came not for books but for what the town had originally been built to do.
Blaenavon still has its male voice choir and its town band. The Pontypool and Blaenavon Railway, restored by volunteers, runs scenic services up the valley. Forgeside RFC and Blaenavon RFC and Blaenavon Blues AFC keep their fixtures going on Saturdays. Notable names that came out of the town include the Broadway and film actor E. E. Clive, mystery writer Dorothy Simpson, and rugby union internationals Ken Jones (also an Olympic sprinter), Mark Taylor, John Perkins, Terry Cobner, Chris Huish, and Colin Evans. Nick Thomas-Symonds, the MP for Torfaen since 2015, grew up here. Blaenavon is twinned with Coutras in France. Future Blaenavon, the community group, has built a garden at the foot of the town. The houses are stone, the streets are steep, the wind comes hard off the moors. The place is not what it was. But what it was is exactly why it still is anywhere on the map.
51.774°N, 3.083°W, high on a hillside in Torfaen at the source of the Afon Lwyd, near the head of the Eastern Valley. Recommended viewing altitude 3,000-5,000 ft AGL to see the town tucked against the dark mass of the Coity and Blorenge mountains, with the ironworks and Big Pit clearly visible on the slopes. Nearest airports: Cardiff (EGFF) approximately 28 nm south-southwest, Bristol (EGGD) 35 nm southeast. The Welsh valleys hold cloud and rain readily; clearest conditions usually follow a passing cold front.