On a Monday night before Christmas in a chapel in Abersoch, a concert is taking place. Abersoch is a seaside village on the Llŷn peninsula, the arm that sticks out from north Wales into the Irish Sea; and this is the end of term Christmas concert of Ysgol Abersoch, the local primary school, a wooden building across the road from the chapel.
On the pews, spaced out in an attempt to keep Omicron at bay, sit parents, villagers, governors, former pupils; some are all of the above, about 50 in total. At the front of the chapel, facing the audience on the other side of a wooden altar rail, are the performers: children aged between four and seven, and dressed colourfully, as an elf, a doll, an angel, a reindeer, a grandmother with orange hair … and that’s it. There are just five of them. Ysgol Abersoch is a very small school; that’s the problem, though not everyone sees it that way.
Actually, there are seven children in the school. But it’s a miracle even five made it tonight. There’s a lot of Covid around; on Friday there were only two pupils in school. But Linda Jones – Mrs Jones, the headteacher, the only full-time teacher, also a former pupil – wasn’t going to let anything stop the concert. Even if none of the children had made it, she would have gone ahead, using puppets instead.
Mrs Jones sits in the front row, prompting, nudging, sometimes playing the clarinet during a song. The children sing, and sway in time, and wave at their families. Vera, the eldest, narrates the story, which is called The Colours of Christmas. It’s all in Welsh. At the end, the audience joins in with Dawel Nos (Silent Night). And Father Christmas (who is actually – look away now, any children reading – Dewi Roberts, a local councillor) turns up with a bin bag full of goodies. It’s a lovely evening.
Ysgol Abersoch pupils performing their Christmas concert last year.
It’s also a really sad evening. The school, which opened in 1924, is being closed down. Not at the end of the school year, but now, at Christmas. Gwynedd council says it’s not practical or financially viable to keep such a small school open. It costs £17,404 per pupil, compared with the county average of £4,198. Closing it will save an estimated £96,000 a year.
But the people of Abersoch, not least the people here in Graig chapel tonight, say it will be the death blow to a community slowly being suffocated by wealthy second-home owners. They point out that the village is empty for much of the year but unaffordable to local families. It’s a story that will resonate in pretty coastal villages across Devon and Cornwall – Kingston, South Huish, Dalwood, St Minver, Padstow and St Merryn, and many more. Also elsewhere in Wales: there were the news reports about the village of Cym-Yr-Eglwys in Pembrokeshire having only one permanent resident left, but these stories were contested, not least by the 10 or so year-round residents who say the situation is more complicated and deeper-rooted than simply millionaire English second-homers buying up all the properties.
Ysgol Abersoch teacher Natalie Williams (left) and headteacher Linda Jones with twins Maisie and Charlotte, six, Vera, seven, Melissa, five, and Mansar, four.
The school in 1924.
In Abersoch, though, the issue is plain. In 2020, 46% of the housing stock was second homes, when commercial holiday lets are included in the definition; there is a luxury development going up where flats will sell for £1.5m; and it is home to Wales’s most expensive street, where the houses are worth much more, while local families live in caravans in the surrounding countryside. And now the school going – the final blow.
At the end of the concert, Eifiona Wood – governor, former parent, former pupil of Ysgol Abersoch – stands up and speaks, in Welsh and English. “We can only thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for making us what we are today,” she says to everyone who has been involved in the school past and present. She chokes up a bit, and she’s not the only one.
***
That’s not quite the end; there are still a few school days left. Next morning, four children make it to class: Vera, who’s seven; twins Maisie and Charlotte, six; and Melissa, five. At the school gate, the twins’ mother, Annette Weston, says she’s devastated. “Some people say there are only a few children here – they can’t be getting a good experience. But it’s totally the opposite. It’s like dropping them off at a family house: it’s a fabulous way to learn, and they love it.”
She says there are 23 children in the village who could be coming to Ysgol Abersoch, which goes up only to year 3, after which pupils go to the school at Sarn Bach, a mile and a half away. The reason more haven’t been coming is that it’s had the threat of closure hanging over it for years. “If you took away the closing order, it wouldn’t be an issue; the school would have plenty of children. I think they took the decision years ago and they’ve been waiting like vultures for numbers to drop to a point where they say, ‘That’s it, we’re going to close.’”
Second homes in Gwynedd are charged 200% council tax. Vera’s mother, Eva Palanova, thinks that this, as well as the stamp duty generated by Abersoch’s thriving property market, could be used to finance the school. “I’m from the Czech Republic. We went through a similar process during communism – built these massive school hubs for 4,000 kids. But now they are reopening all these little schools because parents realise that that’s not what they want; they want a local connection.”
Inside, it doesn’t feel like the end of anything, just the beginning of another day. The classroom is bright and friendly. The walls are covered in school work and art – pictures of a deer, a salmon, a raven, all done in leaves; a project about Diwali; a map of the peninsula. The morning begins with a song about the days of the week, in Welsh. Abersoch, like all the primary schools in this part of Wales, is Welsh language. Mrs Jones sits on the floor, facing the four girls, again prompting when required. The school’s only other teacher, Natalie Williams – Miss Williams – is also in today; you don’t get that kind of teacher-student ratio at many schools.
Mrs Jones remembers being a little girl in this room; she never thought she’d end up as head. She’s desperately sad about her school being closed down, but doesn’t want to go into it too much; she’s going to have to find another job. She doesn’t know what or where yet, and may consider supply teaching.
What about Miss Williams – what will she do? “Cry,” she says. Then she’ll probably go back to supply teaching, too. There aren’t a lot of permanent teaching jobs in the area.
Headteacher Linda Jones with pupils in the classroom.
How do the kids feel about the school closing? “Sad!” they say, in unison. What do they like about Ysgol Abersoch? “Everything!” Incidentally, there is one boy who attends the school, named Bobby, but he’s off, too.
Another student has come in: Mansar, who is four. She hasn’t been well, but she wanted to be in the photo. The Guardian’s photographer is going to recreate the first photograph of the school taken in the 1920s – pupils and staff, outside, standing against a corner of the building. It will serve as pictorial punctuation to end a chapter just shy of a hundred years long.
Mansar’s dad, Sarwar Jamil, the only Iraqi Kurd on the peninsula, is also sad. “The school has been lovely and welcoming. Education is the main thing in the world. If I had any power, I wouldn’t let it happen.” He left Iraq about 17 years ago, ending up cleaning cars on Anglesey. His Welsh is now so-so, he says; Mansar’s is much better.
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A few minutes’ walk away, in Eifiona Wood’s kitchen, I meet three of the school’s governors. With Eifiona are Margot Jones and Louise Overfield. Louise didn’t go to Ysgol Abersoch – she’s an outsider, from England. But her partner, Dylan, did, and their children. Margot, chair of the governors, went there, as did her children; her son Tom recently graduated from Cambridge University, and yes, she does hold Ysgol Abersoch responsible. “I think the attention he received in his formative years, the confidence he was given through being in a small school where everyone’s voice is heard, plays where everyone has a part, everyone is seen, everyone is valid – I can’t image a better start in life.”
Margot has joined by Zoom, even though she’s just round the corner – she’s recovering from Covid. She and the others are actually ex-governors: they resigned when they learned that the council expected them to dismiss the school’s staff, Mrs Jones and Miss Williams. “We will not do their dirty work for them,” they said.
They are devastated – and furious. Angry that the closure went ahead during a pandemic, and that it’s happening in the middle of the school year. Angry that none of the initiatives they’ve started – a nursery, parent and toddler group, beach school, a petition with 3,000 signatures (including that of Bear Grylls, who owns a nearby island) – has succeeded in saving the school. “It just feels like we were walk-on parts in a panto: we had custard pie thrown at us throughout but it’s not really very funny,” says Margot, who has a lovely way with words, even coming out of a laptop.
And they are anxious about what it will mean for their village and their community. “We’ve already lost our bank, our post office, our surgery,” Eifiona says. “There are a lot of second homes, but there is a really strong local community, a strong-willed community, as well.”
Margot worries about the survival of that community, that by taking away the school you lose the mortar that holds it together. “Our parents have been there, we’ve been there, our children have been there, we want our children’s children to go there, and all this has just been lost – that continuity is going to be smashed. It will leave a gaping hole. This community is really in danger of becoming nothing more than a holiday camp.”
She knows that tourism brings jobs and income. “I’ll put my hand up now and say I actually have a holiday let which could have been a home for someone. It’s a struggle to balance that. I justify it by saying that I live here. Any money I earn from it is spent locally … but is that a bit thin? I don’t know.”
Eifiona points out the irony that a large majority of the councillors are Plaid Cymru, the party aiming for a million Welsh speakers by 2050. Closing a place of learning in Welsh in the centre of one of the most anglicised villages in Wales will have a negative impact on the language there, the ex-governors say.
Cymdeithas yr Iaith, the Welsh language pressure group, is similarly unimpressed. “Gwynedd has the highest percentage of holiday homes in Wales, and as a result, house prices are out of proportion with local wages,” Jeff Smith, chair of Cymdeithas’s sustainable communities group, says over email. Abersoch, he argues, now faces an additional challenge. By closing the school, the council is “undermining their housing and language policies and abandoning the community”.
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Abersoch is lovely. It was once a fishing hamlet; the little harbour where the River Soch reaches the sea opens out on to a golden sandy beach, with an even better one just round the headland. On a clear day, the views stretch from the verdant farmland of the interior of the Llŷn peninsula to the mountains of Snowdonia and across Cardigan Bay all the way to Pembrokeshire. No surprise it’s become such a popular tourist destination.
A building plot overlooking the main beach in Abersoch.
Beach huts.
In the media it’s been branded Cheshire-by-the-Sea, because of the number of wealthy visitors who come here from there, as well as everywhere else: footballers, football managers, television personalities, soap stars, adventurers, a lord chief justice, captains of industry, and plenty of ordinary folks on holiday.
Walking through the village, there might not be a doctors’ surgery, a bank or a post office (there are post office facilities in the Londis), but there are plenty of boutiques, surf shops, ice-cream parlours, cafes and restaurants, including a Mexican one. On a winter day like this, many are empty, and some are closed; there are few people around at all, famous or otherwise. It’s a very different story in the summer.
There are two estate agents. One of them doesn’t want to talk to the Guardian; perhaps they’re a tiny bit embarrassed about having just sold a beach hut for £191,000 (£16,000 over the asking price) when local people can only dream of getting a toe on the property ladder. The other, Rhys Elvins, is happy to chat. He’s just sold a 1960s bungalow overlooking the golf course. It was on for £975,000 and went in two weeks, for £1.01m.
He’s got a three-bedroom chalet in The Warren holiday park for just £250k, which sounds like a bargain for around here until you hear it’s only a 19-year lease. I’d call that more of an expensive let, and it’s a way back from the beach. Even so, everything is going super quick. Perhaps because people haven’t been able to go abroad in the pandemic, their outlooks have changed, or they’re retiring earlier. The record is £2.95m, for a three-bedroom house, though that one was on the seafront.
Our guide for the unofficial Abersoch real estate tour is Einir Williams. She is Abersoch born and bred – the family farm is on the edge of the village. Einir, a former pupil of Ysgol Abersoch, is the school clerk; she is also secretary to the parish council. She gets to see the planning applications for extensions, demolitions and new buildings.
An empty plot on the way out of the village is where the Whitehouse hotel used to be and where work is due to start this year on a new £30m development. It will be called The Abersoch, a luxury hotel with 42 rooms and suites, a destination restaurant, pool, gym and spa, as well as 18 apartments. Dewi Roberts (Santa Claus from last night, a big supporter of the school and opponent of its closure) says it will provide 40 much-needed jobs for the area, though the people who get these jobs may not be snapping up the flats. They’re already being marketed from £675,000 for a two-bedroom flat that won’t have a view of the sea, up to £1.65m for a three-bedroom one that will.
Einir takes us round the Benar headland, recently identified as Wales’s most expensive street (even though it isn’t really a street), where houses cost, on average, £2,152,000. There’s a definite look to most of the Benar properties: a lot of glass, a lot of grey, a lot of decking – think Sandbanks meets Big Little Lies. They’re probably lovely inside. Einir is not a fan. “It’s become a play area for people who come in their flash cars,” she says. Not today, though. Again, there’s not a soul to be seen.
The beach hut that sold for £191,000.
Past the yacht club and down on to Abersoch beach, where the beach huts are, with a sold sign on the blue and white one that’s just gone for £191,000. It’s not even the biggest. It doesn’t have water or electricity; it is essentially a very expensive shed.
Einir takes us to another house, in the centre of the village, with a banner hanging from the window: “Nid yw Cymru ar Werth” (“Wales is not for sale”, which, given what we’ve just been seeing, seems like wishful thinking). This is the house of Anna Jones – again, Abersoch to the core, both a past pupil and past headteacher of the school. She recently had eggs thrown at her home, though she’s not sure if it was because of the banner or because it was Halloween. Also present is Wyn Williams, another former pupil, and the previous chair of the governors, as well as a former local councillor.
If the empty grey and glass houses of the headland are what Abersoch will become, sitting around the table in this cosy kitchen, with Anna, Wyn, Einir, and a plate of buttered bara brith, feels like what Abersoch is in danger of losing. They share memories of the school. Wyn, who was there during the war, remembers the coal-burning stove in the middle of the classroom, and the headteacher, Miss Thomas, who was very strict and had a black book into which went the names of children who misbehaved. “I was in the black book quite often,” he says, not unproudly. Anna, who went as a pupil in 1948, digs out old school photos, including one of her with a severely and unfortunately angled fringe; she’d cut it herself, she remembers.
When Anna went back as headteacher, in 1996, there were 11 children. At the end of her reign, in 2003, it was up to 30. “It has always been like that – a coming and going school,” Einir says. And now it’s going completely.
From left: former headteacher Anna Jones with former pupils Einir Williams and Wyn Williams.
Wyn doesn’t blame the council, even though he says the process hasn’t been ideal. “Our dear friend Mr [George] Osborne cut local authority budgets by 40%. If you go to any local authority in Wales or England, you’ll find they’re suffering.” And staying with Tory policy but going back further, he lays plenty of blame on the Thatcher government, in particular Kenneth Baker’s 1988 Education Reform Act, which meant parents no longer simply sent their kids to the local school but were allowed to choose, with schools competing for customers like businesses.
They all agree that the closing of the school is linked to second homes, house prices, young families not being able to afford to live here; again Wyn points another finger at Thatcher. “The other thing Mrs Thatcher did was she allowed council houses to be sold, didn’t she?” Last year a former council house sold for £385,000.
Abersoch has always been wealthier than the surrounding area, and that’s all because of the tourists. They first came in the early 1900s, but it was after the war that it really took off as a holiday destination. Anna remembers her mother renting out rooms in the family farmhouse, and cooking for the guests. “That’s the only time I can remember having toast for breakfast. My mother used to cut the crusts off for them and we were allowed to eat the crusts. I enjoyed having them. I learned to speak English – I used to go for rides with some of them.”
She changed her mind when her parents started to rent out the whole house over the summer, and Anna and her family moved into a room above the barn. She remembers the mayor of Liverpool coming to stay. “I was very active with the Welsh Language Society. He used to say, ‘I’m only coming for a holiday,’ and I said, ‘Don’t speak to me!’”
Is she still militant, I wonder? “Oh, it’s in here,” she says, holding a hand to her heart. It’s not like the 1980s though, when Meibion Glyndŵr, the Welsh nationalist group, were burning down holiday homes, is it? “It’s surprising how many people I have heard saying it’s about time Meibion Glyndŵr came back,” she says. She tried unsuccessfully to put a clause in her will saying that her house could only be sold to local people. And if it ends up as holiday rental, on Airbnb? “Then I will come back and haunt them.”
Wyn says it’s not about hatred: “Everyone relies on the tourist industry.” And it’s not only the locals who do well out of it. “In the past year, the Senedd in Cardiff has had £6m from Abersoch in stamp duty,” he says.
Top: houses out of season are dark and quiet. Above: an architect-designed house overlooking Abersoch beach and harbour.
There were more than 900 people on the electoral register in Abersoch when Wyn became a councillor in 1995. Now it’s down to 568. Of the 30 houses in the street he lives on, only about three are occupied in winter.
“It’s dark at night,” Einir says. “There’s no one living here – it’s all second homes.”
It’s the same story in other parts of Wales, Pembrokeshire, Devon, Cornwall, Ireland, other places in Europe, Wyn says: “They call them the black villages in Finland.” But perhaps in Wales, where it’s about more than pricing locals out of their homes, and a national language and culture is at stake, it hits a particular nerve.
Jeff Smith of Cymdeithas points to a rally in Newport in October, when a young woman training to be a teacher told the crowd that she could not afford a house in the village she grew up in or the surrounding area because prices had increased so much.
“The Welsh government has begun discussing emergency measures to tackle the problem of second and holiday homes,” he says. “But there is more that the government can do now, such as closing loopholes in the law that allow people to avoid taxes on second homes by registering them as a business.” He calls for a property act that – through measures such as changing the definition of affordable housing and controlling rent prices – will “secure a home for everyone”.
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To Rhyd-y-clafdy, a small village a few miles inland but a world away from Abersoch. Actually, to outside Rhyd-y-clafdy, along a muddy farm track, to one more kitchen, though there’s no room for a table here. In the static caravan where Tom Evans and Charlotte Williams live with their five-month-old son Twm and a labrador, also five months, the kitchen doubles as living room, nursery and everything else. Tom, 26, is a plumber, doing his gas apprenticeship (it means at least the caravan has heating); Charlotte, 21, drives a taxi, taking kids who have special needs to school, though she’s on maternity leave at the moment.
They’d like to live in Abersoch, but can’t afford it. They can’t afford to buy, or rent, anywhere around here. “I was brought up here, we’ve got a kid, we can’t live where we want to,” Tom says. “And all the holiday homes, people in them a few weekends of the year and six weeks in summer – the rest of the time they’re empty, and there are people like us struggling in a caravan.”
Tom Evans and Charlotte Williams inside their caravan.
They have been on a list for a council house for more than a year, but have heard nothing, even since the baby. That’s when life got really hard. “There’s not enough room for all the baby things,” Charlotte says. “I have to sell things as soon as he grows out of them because we haven’t got anywhere to keep them. If we have another, we’ll have to buy everything again.”
Tom was working in Manchester before, and had thought of asking Charlotte to move there. “If it was just the two of us, I would’ve considered it,” she says. “But with the baby, I want family around me. I’d like to bring Twm up here.”
Tom thinks the only solution is to build more affordable homes and council houses; otherwise, the situation is going to get worse. “It’s just going to turn people against each other in the end.” They have heard about the £191,000 beach hut. “Sickening,” Tom says. I don’t think they’ll be putting their names down for an apartment at The Abersoch, even one without a sea view.
Back in Abersoch that evening, walking around with the photographer, it looks like Wyn Williams’s black village. There’s a light in one window, then nothing for a couple of houses, then a light in Anna’s house, then more houses in darkness. A housing estate called Cae Du is in near darkness. Is there a power cut? No, because one house’s security light comes on as we pass. Then it goes out again – there’s no one here.
This was once a field on Einir’s farm. Her father sold it, not knowing it would end up as holiday rentals and second homes, empty for much of the year. There may have been a forewarning in the name: cae du, she says, means black field.
The following morning, leaving Abersoch, I pass the little wooden school. It must be break time, because in the playground, with its bright pictures of an octopus, a seal and a crab, there are children.
I can see, and hear, the twins, Maisie and Charlotte; and Melissa, Vera and a boy who must be Bobby. They are playing, happily, loudly, in Welsh. It’s lovely, and also very sad. Because by the time you read this, there won’t be children playing there, or learning there, in Abersoch, any more.
