Town in Torfaen, Wales
Blaenavon
Blaenavon's ironworks helped change how the world makes steel, and its old coal mine now matures cheddar deep underground.
Key information
- County
- Torfaen
- Nation
- Wales
- Known for
- Big Pit National Coal Museum, Blaenavon Ironworks and its World Heritage industrial landscape
- Famous people
- Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, Percy Gilchrist, Thomas Hill
About Blaenavon
The cheddar that ripens in a coal mine
Start with the cheese. Pwll Mawr cheddar is matured in the old workings of Big Pit, deep beneath the hills above Blaenavon. It's an unlikely home for a dairy product, but the cool, steady air underground suits it nicely. That's very Blaenavon: a place where something from the industrial age has been given a second career. The coal is gone, but the tunnels are still earning their keep. The name itself is a clue to the landscape. Blaenafon, as it's spelled in Welsh, comes from blaen, meaning head or source, and afon, meaning river. This is a town at the top of the valley, on the edge of the moorland.
The ironworks that arrived in the middle of nowhere
In 1789, three businessmen, Thomas Hill, Thomas Hopkins and Benjamin Pratt, started an ironworks on bleak upland. It made sense for one reason: everything needed to make iron was close at hand. Iron ore, coal and limestone were all in the surrounding hills, and fast streams could supply water power. Blaenavon Ironworks became one of the best-preserved 18th-century ironworks in Europe. Its furnaces, casting houses and the remarkable water-balance lift can still be seen. The works also came with homes. Stack Square, built for ironworkers, is a reminder that the whole town grew up around the furnaces, not the other way round.
The cousins who fixed steel
Blaenavon has a place in the story of modern steel. In the late 1870s, Percy Gilchrist, a chemist working at the ironworks, helped test an idea from his cousin Sidney Gilchrist Thomas. The problem was phosphorus. Iron made from ores rich in it produced brittle steel, and much of Europe's ore was exactly that kind. The Thomas-Gilchrist process used a special furnace lining to draw the phosphorus out. The result was that previously unusable ores could be turned into good steel. The trials at Blaenavon helped steelmaking spread across the industrial world.
Going down Big Pit
Big Pit began as a coal mine in the 19th century and was worked until 1980. It reopened in 1983 as a museum, and it's one of the few places where visitors can go underground with former miners as guides. The descent is about 90 metres in a cage. You wear a helmet and a lamp, and you walk through roadways where men, and once boys and horses, worked in the dark. Part of its appeal is that it doesn't feel polished. The pit's buildings, winding gear and baths are still there, and the stories come from people who actually worked there.
A whole landscape on the World Heritage list
In 2000, the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The listing covers far more than the ironworks and the pit. It takes in quarries, old railways and tramroads, reservoirs, workers' housing and the patterns of fields and hillsides shaped by industry. Above the town, the Blorenge mountain gives a wide view of the valleys and the Brecon Beacons beyond. Pwll Du, high on the moor, shows how far the works reached into the hills. The Pontypool and Blaenavon Railway keeps part of that history moving, running steam trains on a short stretch of preserved line. It's an unusual sort of heritage: not castles or cathedrals, but grit, smoke and hard labour. The town's cobbled streets and its Workmen's Hall, built in 1894, show how much community life depended on the works.
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