Seven Quaker families from Nantucket arrived in 1792, hauling the American whaling industry across the Atlantic in their luggage. They had refused to fight in the Revolutionary War; their countrymen had not forgiven them. High tariffs on whale oil from the new United States made the trade unworkable at home. So when Sir William Hamilton and his nephew Charles Greville offered a fresh start in a brand-new Welsh town - laid out on a grid above one of the world's deepest natural harbours - the Starbucks and their neighbours packed up their try-pots and crossed the ocean. The town they built still stands on Hamilton Terrace. The whales did not last. The town did.
Most British towns grew the way trees do, slowly and with knots. Milford Haven was planned. When the Milford Improvement Act passed Parliament in 1790, the streets were already drawn: three parallel terraces - Hamilton, Charles, and Robert - running along the high ground above the haven, named for the patrons who imagined the place into being. Sir William Hamilton had inherited the land through his first wife, Catherine Barlow. His more famous second wife, Emma, the future companion of Lord Nelson, would visit too. The grid filled in faster than anyone expected. The Custom House went up in 1797, built specifically to hold whale oil awaiting ship to London. By the early 1800s the docks were busy with American crews speaking the Yankee English of Nantucket harbours.
The whaling lasted barely a generation. The Quakers drifted away or assimilated. The town turned to fishing - by 1921, six hundred and seventy-four people worked the trawlers, with two thousand more in support, and at peak times two hundred trawlers crowded the docks. Then the Great Depression hit, and Milford was officially classified as 'distressed.' The fishing recovered, then collapsed again under overfishing and economic pressure; by 1972 only twelve trawlers remained registered at the port. Each time the town reinvented itself. The oil refineries arrived in 1960 and dominated the local economy for fifty years. The Esso refinery closed in November 2014 with the loss of over three hundred jobs, converting to a storage facility. Now the LNG terminals at South Hook and Dragon move a quarter of Britain's natural gas through the haven, and the marina hosts cruise ships and yachts where trawlers once tied up. Milford Haven has always lived close to the global economy. That has been its luck and its problem in equal measure.
Linguistically, this corner of Pembrokeshire stands apart. The area is known historically as 'Little England Beyond Wales,' a strip of English-speaking territory dating to medieval times that runs along the southern coast while Welsh remains strong in the hills just north. Only 7.5 percent of residents in the Milford Central ward speak Welsh, against 18 percent in Pembrokeshire as a whole and 40 percent in neighbouring Carmarthenshire. In 2008 the town council unsuccessfully demanded the right to opt out of providing Welsh translations for official documents - one of only about ten councils in Wales to take that position. The boundary has held for nearly a thousand years, an invisible line drawn by Norman settlement that has somehow survived every effort to redraw it.
Howell Davis, born in the Milford Haven area in 1680, became one of the most successful pirates of the Caribbean Golden Age before being shot dead on the Portuguese island of Principe in 1719 - the man whose crew trained Black Bart Roberts. Isaac Davis, a former Milford seaman, sailed to Hawaii in the 1790s and became a trusted advisor to Kamehameha I, helping unify the islands into a kingdom. Television producer Annabel Jones, who grew up here, went on to co-create Black Mirror. Novelist Sarah Waters attended the grammar school. Microbiologist Sir Stewart Cole became the first foreign scientist to lead the Institut Pasteur in Paris. The actor Howell Davies (no relation to the pirate), and singer-songwriter Sarah Howells of Paper Aeroplanes, both grew up walking these streets. The town sends people out and welcomes a smaller stream back.
The Rath is the town's spine - a high landscaped street above the haven, with views that take in the full sweep of the waterway. In the 17th century this was a gun battery; in the 1930s it became an open-air swimming pool; in 1990 the pool became water gardens. The Torch Theatre, opened in 1977, is one of only three repertory theatres in Wales, with its own resident company. The Pill Social Centre - dating to the 1950s - has hosted The Who and Gerry and the Pacemakers in evenings the older residents still talk about. Milford Haven Museum sits in that same 1797 Custom House, telling a story that begins with whale oil and runs through trawlers, refineries, and Q-Flex tankers from Qatar. The town twins with Oissel in Normandy and Uman in Ukraine - a small Welsh port keeping company with friends on both sides of a continent at war.
Milford Haven sits at 51.71 N, 5.04 W on the north shore of the Milford Haven Waterway in Pembrokeshire. From the air, look for the geometric Georgian grid of Hamilton Terrace running parallel to the waterway, with the marina basin and Havens Head Retail Park along the docks; the LNG storage spheres of South Hook are unmistakable just to the west. Best viewing 5,000-12,000 feet on a clear day. Nearest airports: EGFE (Haverfordwest/Withybush) 10 nm north-northeast, EGFH (Swansea) 60 nm east. Expect maritime weather - frequent low cloud and Atlantic showers.