and a statue of Mr William Thomas of Lan erected in 1905 in appreciation of the work done by him in preserving and obtaining “open spaces” for Swansea. In the town itself there are statues of J. Henry Vivian and of his son Sir Henry Hussey Vivian (created Lord Swansea in 1893) each in his turn the “copper king.” The corporation owns about 645 acres of land within the limits of the
ancient borough. This consists mainly of land acquired under an
Inclosure Act of 1761, but a small part is surplus land acquired
in 1876–1879 in connexion with an improvement scheme for clearing
a large insanitary area in the centre of the town.
The town is lighted with gas supplied by a gas company first incorporated in 1830 and by electricity supplied by the corporation. There is a good system of electrically worked tramways, 512 m. being owned by a company and nearly 6 m. by the corporation, but the whole worked by the company. The town obtains its chief supply of water from moorlands situated on the Old Red Sandstone formation in the valley of the Cray, a tributary of the Usk in Breconshire where a reservoir of 1,000,000,000 gallons capacity has been constructed at a cost of £547,759. under parliamentary powers obtained in 1892, 1902 and 1905. The water is brought to the town in a conduit consisting of 2313 m. of iron pipes and 3 m. of tunnel into a service reservoir of 3,000,000 gallons capacity made on the Town Hill at an elevation of 580 ft. above sea-level. There is a further supply obtained from three reservoirs of a combined capacity of 513,000,000, constructed in 1866, 1874 and 1889 respectively in the Lliw and adjoining valleys, in the drainage area of the Loughor, about 10 m. to the north of Swansea.
Harbour and Commerce.—Swansea owes its commercial prosperity to its great natural advantages as a harbour and its situation within the South Wales coal basin, for the anthracite portion of which it is the natural port of shipment. It is the most westerly port of the Bristol Channel and the nearest to the open sea, only 35 m. from the natural harbour of refuge at Lundy, and there is sheltered anchorage under the Mumbles Head at all states of the tide.
The modern development of the port dates from about the middle of the 18th century when coal began to be extensively worked at Llansamlet and copper smelting (begun at Swansea in 1717, though at Neath it dated from 1584) assumed large proportions. The coal was conveyed to the works and for shipment to a wharf on the east bank, on the backs of mules and somewhat later by means of a private canal. The common quay was on the west bank; all ships coming in had to lie in the nver bed or in a natural tidal basin known as Fabian’s Bay, on the east. Under an act of 1791 harbour trustees were appointed who cleared and deepened the river bed and built a long pier on either side of it; in 1796 the approach to the port was made safer by means of an improved light on Mumbles Head. A canal connecting the tidal part of the river Neath with the mouth of the Tawe, made in 1789, was in 1824 connected with the Vale of Neath canal by means of an aqueduct across the Neath river, when also a small dock, Port Tennant (so named after its owner) or Salthouse Dock, was made near the east pier, and this continued to be used till 1880. Meanwhile in 1798 the whole coalfield of the Swansea Valley was connected with the port by a canal 1612 m. long (acquired by the Great Western railway in 1872). In 1851 the river was diverted eastward into a new channel (called the New Cut) and its old channel was locked and floated, thereby forming the North Dock with an area of 1112 acres and a half-tide basin 500 yards long covering 212 acres. The Swansea Valley canal has a connecting lock with this dock, and on the island between the dock and the New Cut are patent fuel works, copper ore yards and other mineral sheds and large grain stores and flour mills. The South Dock, begun in 1847 under powers obtained that year by a private company, transferred in 1857 to the harbour trustees and opened in 1859, is mainly used for shipping coal and for discharging timber and fish. Lying parallel to the sea front and to the west of the entrance channel from which it runs at right angles, it has an area of 13 acres with a half-tide basin of 4 acres and a lock 300 ft. long by 60 ft. wide. The next development was on the east side of the river where the natural inlet of Fabian’s Bay, inside the harbour mouth, was utilized for the construction of the Prince of Wales’s Dock (authorized 1874, opened October 1881, extension opened March 1898). Its total area is 27 acres, its quays are nearly 7000 ft. long, and it is connected with the Tennant canal. The very rapid increase in the demand for anthracite coal (for the shipment of which Swansea has practically a monopoly) soon necessitated still further accommodation and in July 1904 was begun the King’s Dock, which lies farther east and has an entrance direct from the bay. By means of the embankment made in connexion with it, 400 acres were reclaimed from the sea. It has an area of 68 acres, its lock measures 875 ft. by 90 ft. and its quays 10,550 ft. long, and it has a depth of 32 ft. of water, or inner cill. The total dock area of Swansea has thus been increased to about 147 acres with a total length of quays exceeding 3 m. The harbour docks and adjacent railways (which exceed 20 m.) are owned and administered by a harbour trust of 26 members, of whom one is the owner of the Briton Ferry estate (Earl Jersey), 4 represent the lord of the seigniory of Gower (the duke of Beaufort), 12 are proprietary members and 9 are elected annually by the corporation of Swansea. The trustees are conservators of the river Tawe and parts of Swansea Bay, and the pilotage and lighthouse authority of the district. They were incorporated by the Harbour Act of 1854. There are 9 private graving docks.
The total exports (foreign and coastwise) from Swansea during 1907 amounted to 4,825,898 tons, of which coal and coke made up 3.655,050 tons; patent fuel, 679,002 tons; tin, terne and black plates, 348,240 tons; iron and steel and their manufactures, 38,438 tons; various chemicals (mostly the by-products of the metal industries), 37,100 tons; copper, zinc and silver, 22,633 tons. Its imports during the same year amounted to 899,201 tons, including 172,319 tons of grain ana other agricultural produce, 156,620 tons of firewood, 145,255 tons of pig-iron and manufactured iron and steel, 47,201 tons of iron ore, 121,168 tons of copper, silver, lead, tin and nickel with their ores and alloys, 63,009 tons of zinc, its ores and alloys, 41,029 tons of sulphur ore, phosphates and other raw material for the chemical trade. The town (which is often called “the metallurgical capital of Wales”) is the chief seat of the copper, spelter, tin-plate and patent fuel industries, and has within a compass of 4 m. over 100 different works of 36 varieties (exclusive of collieries) for the treatment or manufacture of copper, gold, silver, lead, sulphate of copper, spelter, tinplates, steel and iron, nickel and cobalt, yellow metal, sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid, creosote, alkali, galvanized sheets, patent fuel as well as engineering works, iron foundries, large flour and provender mills, fuse works and brick works. Copper smelting, which during most of the 19th century was the chief industry, has not maintained its relative importance, though Swansea is still the chief seat of the trade, but three-fourths of the tinplates manufactured in Great Britain and nineteen-twentieths of the spelter or zinc are made in the Swansea district, and its tube works are also the largest in the kingdom. While the bulk of the coal is sent to France and the Mediterranean ports, an increasing quantity of anthracite is shipped to Germany, and, in sailing vessels to the Pacific ports of America, patent fuel is largely sent to South America, whence return cargoes of mineral ores and grain are obtained, while Germany, France, Italy, Rumania, the United States and the Far East are the chief customers for tinplates. Over one hundred fishing-smacks and trawlers usually land their catches at the south dock, where there is a flourishing fish-market. There is also a large ice factory.
From 1535 to 1832 (with the exception of 1658–1659) Swansea was associated with the other boroughs of Glamorgan in sending one representative to Parliament. In 1658 Cromwell gave the town the right of separately returning a member of its own, but this right lapsed with the Restoration. In 1832 St John’s, St Thomas and parts of the parishes of Llansamlet and Llangyfelach were added to the parliamentary borough of Swansea, to which along with the boroughs of Neath, Aberavon, Kenfig and Loughor a separate representative was given. In 1836 the municipal borough was made coextensive with the parliamentary borough and continued so till 1868, when some further small additions were made to the latter, with which the municipal borough was once more made co-extensive in 1889. Meanwhile in 1885 the parliamentary constituency was made into two divisions with a member each, namely Swansea Town consisting of the original borough with St Thomas’s, and Swansea District consisting of the remainder of the borough with the four contributory horoughs. In 1888 Swansea was made a county borough and in 1900 the various parishes constituting it were consolidated into the civil parish of Swansea. Its total area is 5194 acres. The corporation consists of 10 aldermen and 30 councillors. The assizes and quarter sessions for Glamorgan are held at Swansea alternately with Cardiff. The borough has a separate commission of the peace, and, since 1891, a court of quarter sessions.
The population of the old borough was 6099 in 1801 and 13,256 in 1831; after the first extension it amounted to 24,604 in 1841. The population in 1901 was 94,537. Of those who were three years of age and upwards, nearly 67% were returned as speaking English only, 29% as speaking both English and Welsh, and 312% as speaking Welsh only.
History.—No traces of any Roman settlement have been discovered at Swansea, though there seems to have been a small one at Oystermouth, 5 m. to the south, and the Via Julia from Nidum (Neath) to Loughor probably passed through the northern part of the present borough where a large quantity of Roman coins was found in 1835. The name Swansea stands for Sweyn’s “ey” or inlet, and may have been derived from King Sweyn Forkbeard, who certainly visited the Bristol Channel
