Coed Darcy II

The Coed Darcy development in south Wales stands as a testament to the transformative power of urban regeneration, with Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council leading on a project to convert a former BP oil refinery site into a thriving community.  With key stakeholders, The King's Foundation created a masterplan, Guidance and Town Code.  This once blighted landscape now boasts attractive housing, prosperous businesses, and a cutting-edge University campus.  The business district has already created 1,500 plus jobs, and the university has secured 183 contracts.

     I didn't realise until Thursday that I was so out of the loop on this subject.  I really should have been more aware when the story hit in Jan/Feb this year, after all there was a massive spike in the number of page views that my post on the Coed Darcy development was getting.  So, what caused this?
     At the beginning of the year, a local Swansea man, Jay Curtis, out filming with his drone, came across a group of abandoned houses he knew nothing about.  The subsequent video, posted on social media, went 'viral' sparking media interest.  Articles appeared on the BBC & Wales Online, and there were articles in the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Mirror at least.  Quickly the story changed to talk about the whole redevelopment and it's very apparent failures.  Nor were these the first media reports of the problems at Coed Darcy; in November 2023 the Mirror published a lengthy article under the headline 'Newbuild Village Hell as 4,000 home development still has no school or shops'.

     As anyone who has watched Jay's atmospheric video can testify the houses are in a terrible state.  Not only that, there is something decidedly sinister about them.  Some of the garden walls, in particular, look like they have been witness to mass executions.  At the time the origin of this small cluster of houses was presented in the media as a bit of a mystery.  In fact, some of them (not the Telegraph) were really rather coy about the origins of it all.  

     However, before I get started, I need to say - for the record - that I know several people who were involved at the early stages of the development and now, as far as I aware, no longer are. I should also say that I am an alumnus of the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture (now The King's Foundation).

     It's probably best begin with a brief recap of the 20th century history of Coed Darcy.  From 1919 until its closure in 1998 the site was occupied by what was eventually called the BP Llandarcy oil refinery, what was, by the 1960s, the 3rd biggest refinery in the UK.  The following year, 1999, the Welsh Government called in the then Prince's Foundation to draw up a plan for the redevelopment of the site.  A Masterplan was drawn up by the Foundation in collaboration with Design LK and Alan Baxter Associates.

    In 2008 ten years after the closure of the refinery, and after a five year project by BP to clear the site of structures, the site was sold to the property developers St Modwen, and work commenced on a three year environmental remediation. In retrospect this seems an optimistic timetable.  It is more than likely that the developers found the site in a worse condition than they expected, such is the nature of such sites

     At some point in that process, that small hamlet of houses - some eight in all - which Jay Curtis came across one winter's day at the beginning of the year, was constructed (about the same time as construction began on the mass market housing at the further end of the site).  This 'Demonstration Village' was funded by BP.  And very good it was; the scheme even going as far as to furnish one of the houses in impeccable style.  Tom Gough from St Modwen announced the houses 'sat there ready to be occupied.'*  There was even talk of artists living there.  In July 2013 the Prince of Wales (as was) visited the scheme to give it his imprimatur.  It was a moment of quiet celebration, a milestone in the rehabilitation of the site had been reached. The event was filmed by the Prince's Foundation and posted on YouTube. On the video, Ben Bolgar, head of design at the Foundation, said:

     'The Prince of Wales is today visiting this part of Coed Darcy Development which we call the Demonstration Village.  And it was designed specifically with the idea of setting a standard and a vision and aspiration for the site as a whole.  So it uses ecological materials - clay block, lime renders and mortars, Welsh slate, Welsh stone - and is here to show really what people can do when they put their mind to it in terms of clearing up after activities of refining.  This really is for us a poster-child - saying when you're standing on a former tip of an oil refinery, probably the most polluted part of the site, and then you end up with something as beautiful as this, as clean as this, and you watch nature coming back - cormorants fishing; swans, ducks we've had this morning - then you really begin to believe that human beings are capable of living in harmony with nature.'

     So just what is going on at Coed Darcy now?

     To be honest, like so many other people, I don't quite know.  Let me, however, qualify that; it is apparent that the reality is a long way from the glowing statement from the King's Foundation with which I started this post.**  It doesn't say, for instance, that construction has ceased, has been stopped for years now, with only 294 houses have been built out of 4,000, and that the promised amenities - such as shops, doctor's surgery and schools are yet to appear.  No mention is made either of the developers successful attempts at changing the Town Code.

     Apparent also, that that 'poster-child', the 'Demonstration Village', a folie de grandeur, a Potemkin Village that was used for a few hours on a single July morning, was abandoned almost immediately afterwards and has been left to slowly rot over the past 13 years.  That is shameful, particularly when you consider it has been estimated to have cost up to £5m, but then, apparently, no effort was ever made at the time to connect it to the rest of the development or the world around it.  Regardless of what was said at the time, I doubt that St Modwen had any intention of letting anyone live there.  I also know from personal experience, that the company were very reluctant to allow potential visitors access.  And who could blame them, when less than a hundred feet to the east of the village, the remediation of the land was still continuing, and judging by a Google Earth image I found easily enough while researching this blog, it most likely continues today.

     The ongoing costs of remediation contributed to the financial difficulties of St Modwen.  The Coed Darcy site was, and remains, essentially a 'money-pit'.  Rendered therefore vulnerable to takeover, the company was acquired by the American Private Equity firm Blackstone in 2021.  St Modwen was then split into three subsidiaries: St Modwen Homes, St Modwen Logistics and Brighton STM, managed by another subsidiary of Blackstone, Revantage.  St Modwen Homes was then sold to the Scottish developer Miller Homes, which is in turn owned by Apollo, another American investment firm.  Wisely, at the time of purchasing St Modwen Homes, Miller refused to have anything to do with Coed Darcy.  Putting aside St Modwen Logistics, this leaves Brighton STM, and here things get even more labyrinthine (if things weren't labyrinthine enough at this point).  Brighton STM is a corporate shell company.  It does no active external business.  It is just a way of tidying up the legal liabilities and all the other leftover bits from Blackstone's acquisition of St Modwen and its subsequent sundering.  It does, however, have two direct consequences for the Coed Darcy development, and much more importantly for the residents. Firstly, there is the ongoing corporate administration and estate management functions of the site, and which are actually done by Revantage, and secondly Brighton STM has 'inherited' St Modwen's legal role as responsible developer.

     The combination of all these factors, and the continuing on-going remediation, has resulted in almost complete inertia, a standoff between the various 'stakeholders'.  Certainly nothing has changed since the Mirror article of November 2023.  Current residents have been left in stasis, and the built environment is beginning to fray at the edges.  Some of the residents have talked of the place as a 'war zone'.  Their disquiet is highly understandable.  People cannot make plans when the future is so uncertain.  'Stakeholders' - council, developers and the like - are almost silent and when they do speak, the emollient, dead-behind-the-eyes press statements do little to help.  Everything just seems to go round in circles.

     I honestly can see no way forward out of this mess at present.  It is unlikely that either Cardiff or Westminster will step in at this point with a Compulsory Purchase Order and thereby be saddled not only with the cost of compensation but the seemingly never ending environmental remediation.  Further, I don't see how any of the so-called 'stakeholders' come out this very well, be they the Welsh Government, Neath Port Talbot council, the King's Foundation or the developers.

* He went on to point out that this was reliant on the provision of services. 

** '35 years of Impact', published 2025.  There were meant to be a number of events to mark this occasion, but, I believe, they were all(?) shelved.  To be honest the quality of the architecture at Swansea Bay Campus is so poor, I hardly be inclined to chalk that one up as a win either.

God's Grandeur

God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.   Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
 
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Old Garden

    

     Some images from my old garden back on the Fen edge in Lincolnshire collected from here and from Instagram.  I do miss it.

The Royal Welsh Show 2026

    Back to Le Pays Des Galles Profond, and the Royal Welsh Show 2026.  This time, instead of taking the train, we drove over from the Infernal City, over the Brecon Beacons and down into the Usk Valley, past Brecon and down into the valley of the Wye to Builth Wells.

     The show site, lies, a great festal city of tents and caravans, over the Wye from the town.  For the farming community of the principality and beyond a place of pilgrimage - almost.  For the younger members of that community a passage rite.

     This was our second visit, and it was both busy and hot.  We must have spent about four hours there and yet I realise we barely skimmed the surface.  How could it be otherwise?  The show lasts for four days, and there are a good twelve hours of events each day.  Like all the other visitors we were merely spectators while the 'Great Work' of show, the judging of livestock etc continued around us.  Two worlds rubbing along amicably, but with some element of incomprehension.  Sadly for us, and a great many others, this is our one connection to the farming community.

     Lunch at Hafod a Hendre.  Where the exhibitors eat.

     But for me it was not always so.  I was raised between the Wars,   in a small market town in s Lincolnshire.  My grandfather was a local butcher (at one time, he had to slaughter the animals he bought to sell in his shop).  He had a flock of sheep and owned a few fields.  Chickens were kept.  The town then, in the Late 60/early 70s, had a weekly cattle market, and a busy twice weekly street market.  There were also a number of farm supply shops, places to buy tractors and other kit, a grain merchants and straw merchants, the later had a Royal Warrant.  And then, over a couple of decades or so, perhaps less, it all went.

    The livestock market was the first to go - the victim of what?  The EEC CAP farming policy, which in East Anglia and the East Midlands, at least, encouraged massive over-production of cereals, or a desire to tidy things up and centralise that sort of messiness?  It resulted, eventually, to a whole area, being redeveloped.  A long length of North St was demolished - a smashing if domineering Victorian office block, a Georgian shop and a long building - Judges - with a Georgian Gothick stone front concealing a Medieval timber structure.  Listed Grade II in 1977, and left to rot for a decade by the developer.  Gone.  All of it gone.  And in their place a cheap hideous shopping centre that has never really had a full occupancy except for the expediency of charity shops.  All the worse considering that in London the 'Comyn Ching Triangle' was then just about complete.*

     Next to fall was was the twice weekly street market, for understandable reasons it was moved to a car park but within a month it had collapsed; the Saturday market often reduced to single stall.  And with it and the other changes the whole social life centred around the market collapsed too.  For people living in the surrounding villages life became smaller.

    I suppose one can understand some of the councils actions but the effect was deadening, a sort embourgeoisement of the public space.  It became 'safe', but I prefer the cabbage stalks, the straw, and the dung.

* I once tried to introduce one of our councillors - a friend of the family - to the New Urbanism, but it was like talking to a brick wall.

  

     

An Artist of the Golden Age: Zurbarán at the National Gallery

     

      Los santos se han de pintar de manera que no quiten la gana de rezar en ellos, antes pongan devocion pues el principal efecto y fin de su pintura ha de ser esta.

     Back to my flying visit to London the other week, and after I had photographed the Comyn Ching Triangle I headed off to The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and the current exhibition of work by the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664).

    This was my first in depth encounter with his work, and for that matter, with the exception of Picasso, any Spanish Art of any period.  I think I may only have encountered Zurbarán's work in reproduction to be honest.  I can only therefore describe this exhibition as a revelation.  An intense, at times profound, experience, with the visitor immediately plunged into devotional world of the Spanish Counter Reformation.  The world of the Spanish Mystics, of St Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and St Ignatius Loyola.  What you might think of as the unseen engine of this exhibition.

     Confronting the visitor is a monumental depiction of the Crucifixion - the earliest signed work by Zurbarán - Christ is near to death, the darkness has come upon all the earth, blotting out everything. He is naked save for his brilliant white loin cloth, and his is alone.  Alone as forlorn, alone as the sole focus of devotion.  It is said that his contemporaries thought they were viewing a sculpture, not a painting.

      And then, to the right, there is the breath-taking 'Martyrdom of St Serapion' of 1628.  The saint, who came from the Great Britain and was martyred for his ransoming of Christian slaves in North Africa and is depicted, dressed in the habit of the Mercedarian friars, hanging by his wrists, head on one side, heavy with either exhaustion or death. In reality he was crucified and his body hacked to pieces.  To be honest I don't think I've ever seen a painting quiet like it, the composition is so unusual.  Both paintings point to Zurbarán's supreme mastery of fabric.  In the martyrdom it is almost all fabric.

     Francisco de Zurbarán was born in Fuente de Cantos, in Extramadura, at the mid-point of the Golden Age - the Siglo de Oro - a roughly two hundred year period marked at one end by the completion of the Reconquista, and Columbus's first voyage to the New World, and at the other the Terminus ad Quem of the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659, and (according to some historians) the Terminus post Quem of the death of the dramatist Pedro Colderon de la Barca in 1681. A period not only of Spanish military and political dominance in Europe and beyond, but a remarkable expansion in the arts and architecture.  Zurbarán's working life was spent mainly in the city of Seville, a place that was both provincial (a long way from the artistic centres of the Italian Peninsular and the Low Countries) and the hub of trans-Atlantic trade between Spain and her empire.  There was, therefore, a lot of money to be spent on art.

     To put him into an artistic, and European, context, Zurbarán was born, lived, and died  during the nascence of the Baroque, when the city of Rome underwent an extraordinary century long transformation. Bernini was his exact contemporary. In Spain, El Greco had died when Zurbarán was sixteen, and Velasquez, Murillo were near contemporaries.  And yet, except for the possible influence of Caravaggio,* Zurbarán seems hardly touched by any of this.  He eschews the writhing ecstasy, the effulgence of sensation.  And, as pointed out by Jaspreet Singh Boparai, writing in The Spectator (25.4.26), he eschews blood.  Zurbarán's art, in contrast, is sober, possessing an austere spiritual intensity that seems to look back not only to the High Renaissance, but the Late Medieval Art of the Low Countries.** His figures have heft.

     All of this is not so far from 'estilo disornamentado' - aka the Arquitectura Herreriana - the architectural style developed by Juan de Herrera during the construction of El Escorial, the vast palace complex commission by Philip II outside Madrid.  Like the painter, the architect before him rejected the excesses of Mannerism, retaining a preference for the High Renaissance, and like the painting the architecture has a lingering sense of the Gothic. What was produced by these men was a sort of distilled creation, shorn of the extraneous.  Zurbarán's use of tenebrism is, perhaps, part of that process of elimination.

     To return now to the paintings.  The second room (there are seven in all) contains the single picture in the exhibition I actively disliked.  (There always had to be one.)  'The Virgin of the Rosary with the Carthusians', 1648-9.  It hangs between two other paintings, 'The Circumcision' and 'The Adoration of the Magi', which together formed a single tier from what must have been a colossal altarpiece, commissioned by the Carthusians of Jerez de la Frontera.  'The Adoration' I particularly liked.  A fine composition, rather Netherlandish.

     The third room contains of what you might term religious portraits - virgin martyrs in beautifully rendered contemporaneous costume and two depictions of St Francis of Assisi.  One, of St Francis standing, is often used to exemplify Zurbaran's work.  Justifiably so.

     Movingly, in the fourth room, a group of three immense crucifixions, and on the wall opposite two Assumptions of the Virgin Mary. In the fifth, some rare secular work, particularly three (?) paintings from a series of seven of the Labours of Hercules.  Opposite two of larger series of the sons of Jacob, on loan from the Bishop's Palace at Bishop Auckland in County Durham, where they grace the Prince Bishop's State Dining Room.  I think they were the first of Zurbaban's paintings to arrive in Britain.  They are quite different in tone from the Labours of Hercules, and from a lot of work in the exhibition, what with their exuberant costumes and colouring.  And then there is the Giant Head - an enormous painting of a man's head that has relatively recently been accredited to Zurbarán, placed as to visible from the other end of the enfilade in room 3  It's rather compelling.  If not strange.

     In contrast, the exhibition concludes with two rooms given over to small works; still-lives & devotional works. As the popular reworking of a saying of St Theresa of Avila has it: 'Dios anda entre los pucheros.'***  These still-lives illustrate, for me, a recuring element in Zurbarán's work, a sense of distance, if not unreality, which occurs also sometimes, say, in the work of David Hockney.  A sort of disengagement, that seems particularly strong in the pictures of fruit (invariably lemons) in baskets.  Though obviously painted from life there is an air of detachment about them that could be due to the strange use of light and colour. A juxtaposition of hyperreality of the lemons and the almost schematic treatment of the basket.  In general there is a recurrent strangeness, an awkwardness if you will, about Zurbarán's work that sets it apart, and sometimes disturbs the viewer.

      We are also introduced to the work of his son Juan de Zurbarán, particularly his mesmerizing still-life 'Plate of Grapes', of 1639, painted when he was a mere 19 years old.  Masterly.

 

*       Zurbarán has been called the 'Spanish Caravaggio' from his masterly use of chiaroscuro.  However, it seems unlikely that he had any contact with the art of Caravaggio.  It has been suggested that 

**    King Philip II was avid collector not only of Venetian Art, the art of the Low Countries.

*** 'God moves between the pots and pans.'

Something Nice To Eat

     Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savoury in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality.  It means, in fine, that you are to see imperatively that everyone has something nice to eat.

     So said that eminent Victorian John Ruskin, and who's to argue with him.  He is thus quoted at the beginning of this beguiling 'short' (some 20 mins) directed by Sarah Erulkar, for the Gas Council.  As the dedicated reader of this blog will know I have a certain soft spot for these short films, documentaries, made to be shown in British cinemas before the main feature.  'Something Nice to Eat' is one of my favourites.  It is erudite, intelligent, playful and deeply stylish. Visually, it is a feast.  It may even be described as quintessential 'Sixties'.  After all, the model Jean Shrimpton does make 'a brief but intriguing' appearance.
     I have written briefly about Erulkar before on this blog, when I made mention of her wonderful film for the GPO 'Picture to Post', which is another visual feast. In 'Something Nice to Eat' her cinematographer was Wolfgang Suschitzky, who was also, you'll remember, the cinematographer for 'Get Carter'.  Between them they create some highly arresting and inventive imagery; food in particular is photographed in abundance and with sensuousness.  The fruit and veg stalls in Berwick St market are piled high with produce, both mundane and exotic; the butchers and the fishmongers displays are splendid. War and Post-war Austerity, this film may be saying, is over, banished.  Much use is made too of Schlieren photography (by Ronnie Whitehouse). The result is rather Psychedelic.  

     In both films Erulkar was also the script writer.  Here her words are narrated by David de Keyser, and the recipes presented by John Addey.  The cookery consultant was Margaret Costa of The Sunday Times Magazine.  Music by Johnny Hawksworth.

     In all a very classy production, especially when one considers it is essential an advert for the latest gas appliances.

    

 Something Nice to Eat

1967

Producer:               Anthony Gilkison Associates, The Gas Council

Director:                 Sarah Erulkar

Cinematographer: Wolfgang Suschitsky

Currently reading....

 

....'The Great Fortune'.

    Since my latest London trip I have been reading 'The Great Fortune' the first book in Olivia Manning's remarkable 'Balkan Trilogy', and, yes, I have read them in reverse order.  My excuse, if excuse I needed, was that I was reading them in the classic penguin orange spine edition, and it was a question of reading them when I found them.

     'The Great Fortune' was published in 1960, it is set in Bucharest, at that most inauspicious time, the outbreak of World War II.  Guy Pringle, who works for the British Council, returns to the city with his new wife Harriet. Through her eyes we watch as the small British community, and their Romanian friends, react to the approaching cataclysm.  Chiefly among them is Yaki, Prince Yakimov, a beguiling, English educated, down-at-heal Russian aristocrat.  His is perhaps the most memorable character in all three novels of the trilogy, and his story - the story of his downfall - forms their main sub-plot.

    At this point I had written, 'Like her contemporaries, Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning was Anglo-Irish'.  She saw herself as participating in that 'usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere'.  However I doubt that either statement carries any water, and in any case I don't get the sense it was so important to her or her literary output as it as it was to Elizabeth Bowen.  
     Anyway, back to the 'Balkan Trilogy'; The Spoilt City' appeared in 1962, and 'Heroes and Friends' in 1965.  All three novels are essentially auto-biographical.  As she said to a friend: "I write out of experience, I have no fantasy. I don't think anything I've experienced has ever been wasted."  Indeed not, for nearly two decades later a second trilogy appeared, The Levant Trilogy.

     In 1987 BBC adapted both trilogies for television, producing a series entitled 'Fortunes of War'.  It starred Emma Thompson and Kenneth Brannagh as Harriet and Guy Pringle.  And it was through this adaptation that I discovered the novels.  Both books and series are recommended.  I think you will enjoy them.