Qualla: Swansea Castle

Swansea Castle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Theodore Scott from Houston, USA, CC BY 2.0. Dylan Thomas worked in the ruins of Swansea Castle. In the very early 1930s the building inside the old castle walls held the offices of the South Wales Daily Post, and the sixteen-year-old Thomas wrote film reviews and obituaries there before he wrote much of anything else. By that point the castle had been an outer wall around a workhouse, a bottle factory, a town hall, a prison, and a newspaper, in that approximate order, since the de Mowbrays had walked away from it sometime in the fourteenth century. A castle abandoned in 1331 had spent six hundred years finding new uses. The two blocks of medieval wall that still stand on Castle Square are what remains.

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Image: Theodore Scott from Houston, USA | CC BY 2.0

Swansea Castle: A Caput on the Tawe

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Irid Escent, CC BY-SA 2.0. Henry de Beaumont, the Earl of Warwick who held most of Gower as his personal fief, founded Swansea Castle in 1107 as the caput, the administrative head, of his new lordship. The earliest castle was a timber motte and ringwork on the east side of what is now Swansea city centre, ...

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Image: Irid Escent | CC BY-SA 2.0

Swansea Castle: The Arcaded Parapet

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rainer Boettchers, Public domain. What you can see of the castle today is two sides of the rectangular south-east corner of what was once the outer bailey of the rebuilt thirteenth- and fourteenth-century castle. The south face ends in a tall garderobe tower and is capped with an elegant arcaded parapet walk, a r...

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Image: Rainer Boettchers | Public domain

Swansea Castle: Workhouse, Bottle Factory, Town Hall

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Hillas, CC BY-SA 2.0. By 1650 a surveyor described Swansea Castle as a decayed Building. The owners had been absentee for two centuries, the military function was long gone, and the structure was being repurposed by whoever needed walls and floors. In the 1670s the castle's square tower became a bottl...

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Image: David Hillas | CC BY-SA 2.0

Swansea Castle: The Newspaper and the Demolition

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sloman at English Wikipedia, Public domain. Between 1909 and 1913 the large motte and much of the castle interior were demolished to make room for a new newspaper office. The decision would horrify a modern conservation officer; in early-twentieth-century Swansea it was a routine piece of urban renewal. The new office buil...

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Image: Sloman at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Swansea Castle: Castle Square Today

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stuart Parvin, CC BY-SA 2.0. Through most of the twentieth century the castle was fenced off and opened to the public only on rare occasions, most recently for tours on St David's Day in 2012. In the early 2010s a project funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Welsh Government opened the ca...

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Image: Stuart Parvin | CC BY-SA 2.0