“Walk these streets today and you’ll see students, cafés, corner shops, and old stone walls. But imagine, just for a moment, the same streets 150 years ago – alive with children, crammed houses, smoky skies… and the daily grit of life in the industrial age.”

This part of Swansea changed fast. In the mid-1700s, it was still mostly fields. But by the early 1800s, the copper industry had exploded. Swansea had become a furnace – its heart beating in Landore, Hafod, and Greenhill.

And people needed homes. Quickly.

Workers came pouring in, Welsh labourers, Irish immigrants fleeing famine, and others drawn by the promise of work. Builders threw up houses wherever space allowed, usually without planning, plumbing, or safety in mind. Rows of tightly packed terraces sprang up around here, pressed into steep streets and alleyways.

A house might be little more than two dark rooms with a shared yard. Often a dozen people or more crammed into one home. No toilets. No taps. Just outdoor privies, open cesspools, and shallow wells. Children fetched water by the bucket. Sewage seeped into homes. The smell… imagine it on a hot summer’s day.

Two key surveys from the 1800s tell us just how bad things were.

In 1849, a man named George T. Clark recorded that in one nearby street, 117 houses shared just a few toilets, and many families had none at all. Cesspools overflowed into the streets. In one case, a toilet floor had rotted so badly that the only way to use it was by balancing on stones.

Another report showed that water had to be bought, fetched from distant pumps, or waited for at crowded spouts. One resident said you might queue for hours just to fill a jug.

Yet in these homes, families still found ways to live. To love. To care for one another. A court might be filled with children’s laughter or neighbours sharing firewood. It wasn’t just hardship. It was home.

Eventually, public pressure grew. In the 1870s, campaigns began to clear the worst housing, places like Regent Court and Howell’s Court, known for crime, disease, and desperation. But even that came with a cost.

Instead of building better homes for those displaced, the council-built Alexandra Road a grand street lined with galleries and schools, designed to impress. Meanwhile, the poor were simply pushed elsewhere, often into equally overcrowded houses nearby.

Newspapers of the time asked hard questions:

“Can nothing be done to lift these miserable people from the slough of despair?”

And yet, the people of Greenhill endured. They made the best of what they had. Some raised children who went on to become preachers, shopkeepers, factory workers, and even poets.

Many who once lived in these streets are now buried in the ground around you.

Their houses may be gone, but their stories still live in the soil, the stones, and the spirit of this place. And now, through this garden they’re remembered.