BBC Homes Under The Hammer presenter Martin Roberts has revealed the budget wanted for ambitious plans to reopen a two-mile railway tunnel in south Wales and turn it into a tourist attraction. The Rhondda Tunnel in Blaencwm has been closed for more than 50 years.
Martin told The Sun the project to reopen it will need a £15 million budget with the aim of being finished in two years. The disused tunnel was built in 1885 by the Rhondda and Swansea Bay Railway to link the Rhondda Fawr at Blaencwm to the Afan valley. It opened in 1890 as the third longest railway tunnel in Wales, but it finally became redundant in 1970. The Rhondda Tunnel Society formed in 2014 with the aim of reopening the tunnel as a tourist attraction and bringing new focus to the beautiful but relatively unknown area at the top of the Rhondda Fawr valley.
How Martin became involved with the society begins via his frequent trips to the south Wales valleys filming for BBC’s Homes Under The Hammer, where the beauty of the area and the community spirit really captivated him. Martin says: "I basically fell in love with it - I fell in love with the area, I fell in love with the people, I fell in love with everything about this part of the world - it's an undiscovered gem.”
Martin, of course, also loves property, and when the oldest farmhouse in the Rhondda Valleys was for sale he decided to buy it and renovate it with wife Kirsty into a character-packed Airbnb that can sleep up to 17 people, as a base for tourists to the area.
Martin says: "During the renovation I spent a lot of time there, a lot of time with the community, and I fell in love with the place that is just off the scale - the area around there, just at the top of the Rhondda valley - mountains, waterfalls, but more importantly the people, I've never come across a community that immediately felt so supportive.”
During his time in the Rhondda valleys Martin became aware of the Rhondda Tunnel Society and their campaign to reopen the tunnel and, once he had explored the site, he was enthused to help the group as much as possible. He says: "I was very honoured to be asked to be patron of Rhondda Tunnel Society, and this dedicated group of enthusiasts have been beavering away for the last 10 years doing all the slog - designing things, doing all the feasibility studies, doing all the engineering drawings, with the idea of revealing this incredible piece of Victorian architecture, industrial architecture, which was so important to the area years ago.”
In 2022 Martin bought Blaencwm’s village pub that had closed down during the Covid-19 pandemic in support of the society’s aim to revive the area. The proposition for the pub is to develop it into a gastro pub with an added local shop, extra accomodation and facilities for the local community and visitors to the tunnel and the surrounding area, such as bike hire.
Martin hopes his additional support will help the society in its efforts to secure £15 million in funding from the UK Government's Levelling Up scheme and the Heritage Lottery Fund.
He told The Sun: “I’ve tried to inject a bit of celebrity sparkle into it, getting people talking about this incredible project. It’s a project that has been stuck in a drawer. We’re trying to get it out of that box and onto the table. All the community is behind it. Two years to complete is ambitious and £15million might sound a lot but they gave £30million to Cornwall for a space centre. Given what it would bring to this area — tourism, jobs, prosperity and pride — it is a relatively small amount. I have the bit between my teeth. I really want to make this happen. It comes from the reality that none of us are here forever.”
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