It's one of Wales’ most frequently visited free tourist attractions and, arriving on a sunny spring day, it’s easy to see why. Cyfarthfa Castle stands in a commanding position looking across its park and lake towards the monumental remains of the ironworks it was once built to survey.
The building of the castle – which is not strictly a castle, but a grand mansion created for ironmaster William Crawshay II and his family – was completed in 1825. It’s a vast building with 15 towers and 72 rooms and, when it passed out of the hands of the Crawshays, it became a museum and a school.
It continues to be a museum housing a fascinating selection of displays – from work by Welsh artists to items and exhibits documenting Merthyr’s huge importance as a steel town – the Crawshay’s ironworks was once the largest in the world, with Merthyr accounting for 40 percent of the UK’s iron exports.
Sadly, the rest of the huge building is now inaccessible to the public, having fallen into disrepair. It’s in desperate need of work and that’s precisely what’s in store following the appointment of architect Anna Baker as project director for the Cyfarthfa Foundation, the charity set up to transform Cyfarthfa Castle and Park into an international cultural and heritage destination. The foundation is funded by Welsh Government and is independent of, but works closely with, the council and Merthyr Tydfil Leisure Trust.
An ambitious and wide-ranging set of options for redeveloping the castle and park have been put forward in the Cyfarthfa Plan, a 20-year vision developed by Ian Ritchie Architects to support the regeneration of the Cyfarthfa site.
Now, after a delay during the Covid pandemic, it’s time to choose where to begin, so last month the foundation launched a survey and a series of drop-in sessions to canvas local views on which plans should be prioritised to fulfil that vision.
The castle, whose visitor numbers are around 35,000, having declined from 50,000 pre-Covid, emerged as a clear priority: “If you looked very quickly at the castle, you would probably think it looks great, but, actually, most of it’s in a really bad state of repair,” says Anna. “The museum and art gallery are hosted in the castle, but that only uses about 10% of the building and the rest of it isn’t safe.
“There’s a real need to restore the building and also to drive some investment and future-looking plan into Merthyr, which has an incredible heritage story and was at the heart of the start of industrialisation and ironmaking.
“It’s about how we can use these things to kind of shape the future of the town by using its assets. The castle is well loved by the local and wider population, but there’s now a need to repair it, lift it and drive it forward for the next generation.”
The Cyfarthfa Plan addresses this, alongside a range of other elements including culture, the landscape and nature: “The landscape is the real star of the show within the Cyfarthfa Plan – the ambition is to expand the park from the current 160 acres, to around 250 acres which would take in the furnaces site and extend along the Taff Fechan and Taff Fawr rivers,” says Anna.
She’s enjoying canvassing local opinion and this process will continue because she is keenly aware of the importance of involving local people in any decisions about how to move forward. The architect, who grew up on the west coast of Scotland and studied at the University of Dundee and London South Bank University, took a similar approach in her previous role leading the delivery of the £9m project to restore Cleveland Pools in Bath, the UK’s oldest lido, bringing it back into public use after almost 40 years of dereliction.
It was a tricky project, particularly as the team had no road access, so all deliveries had to be delivered via river barge – but the results have been rapturously received. The project has won various national awards, including for exemplary community engagement, and, on Wednesday night the Restoration or Conservation Project of the Year Award at the Museum and Heritage Awards.
The Merthyr project is exponentially bigger and Anna is delighted to be taking it on.
“Leading the delivery of the Cyfarthfa Plan is a dream role for me,” says Anna. “My love of buildings underpins my interest in the project, but what makes it really exciting to me, and different from many other projects, is the people side of the project, the scale of ambition and how this will have a multigenerational impact over decades of development.”
As the work is set to extend over two decades, it’s important to break it down into stages and choose the early priorities. The Cyfarthfa Plan came out of a study to imagine ways to reinvigorate the historic assets within the area and imagine contemporary, complementary ways to elevate the park’s status as an attraction, reenergise the area and cultivate people’s pride in their history, culture and environment.
In total, around 70 possible projects are included in the plan and about 50 of them are building-centred. Ideas laid out in the plan range from large-scale new developments such as a university, through to smaller initiatives such as landscape trails. Now the aim is to see what excites the local community most and ensure that they feel a vested interest in whatever is created and want to visit and use these places.
“We’ve been doing lots of events lately focused on talking with people and getting their views. It’s been very interesting to hear what’s important to them and what they want us to focus on,” says Anna.
“Some people know the story of Merthyr’s industrial importance, but not everybody does. Train lines all across Europe and America came from Merthyr – the importance of the heritage story here is huge.
“There’s a lot of deprivation and Merthyr needs a positive change, so while the project is about using the heritage, it’s also about more forward-looking aspects. The town has a history of revolution and change and it’s exciting to talk about what’s next. It’s all about using the heritage as a springboard, rather than being too backward looking.”
This approach is reflected by the plans for turning the remains of the ironworks furnaces opposite the castle into an attraction and a part of the whole Cyfarthfa Park offering.
“They’re some of the better preserved furnaces that still exist and they’re much bigger than anything elsewhere, so there’s a big opportunity to do something that could give us more public space – space for performances and for people to understand how it used to work – and to connect site with the castle, because the only reason the castle exists is because of the furnaces,” says Anna.
To get everything under way, the Welsh Government has given the Cyfarthfa Foundation £1.2m in funding and a team of staff is being built to work alongside Anna to execute the first stages of the plan.
“We have to take that big vision and break it down into deliverable chunks,” says Anna. “We need to decide what we need to focus on for the first five years.”
After that, funding will be sought from sources such as the Welsh Government and the Heritage Lottery Fund.
“Before we can start asking for money for the specifics, we need to say what we want to do – and it will be around £50m just for the castle,” says Anna.
It’s a similar process to the one that led to the restoration of Cleveland Pools and Anna is delighted to be working on another heritage project.
“I love heritage. I love existing buildings. The more constraints there are, the more creative you have to be with them.
“We’ve been looking in the last couple of months at how the castle could be used and some people remember Cyfarthfa as a school. It could be a matter of adding a different learning space or more gallery space, but will probably end up with a cultural focus – it’s an art gallery and museum at the moment, but it’s quite small, mostly because of the condition of the building.
“It will be possible to take that and ramp it up tenfold, making sure that if it’s an international quality museum or gallery, that it has all the other functions that you would also expect, like a restaurant, learning spaces, workshops, making it a kind of a real hive of activity for local people. Obviously, we want to drive visitors to come into Merthyr too, but this has to be the beating heart of Merthyr for local people.”
The Foundation has also been approached by Welsh Government to enter a competition for the castle to become the possible ‘anchor site’ of a new National Contemporary Art Gallery for Wales.
“Welsh Government has an ambition to create a national gallery for contemporary art in Wales through what’s called the distributed model – so it will be a national gallery that’s distributed around approximately 10 galleries, creating contemporary art access across the country,” says Anna.
“They have also invited a number of places to bid for what they’re calling the anchor site, which will be the core part of it – and the anchor for this chain of other galleries and that’s what we’re bidding for. We don’t know who the other competitors are, but we’re really excited about it. I think the Valleys is crying out for a big cultural attraction like this.”
Another area of focus is the creation of environmental opportunities in the area, including green skills development and green jobs. This is often referred to as going from ‘green to black to green’, reflecting the landscape’s shift from rural to industry and its subsequent regreening.
“Now it’s about how to take that regreening into the future and make sure that people are learning sustainable skills,” says Anna. “Biodiversity has to be about jobs as well, because one of the big problems here is employment – there is a need for good jobs that are stable.
“There is the opportunity for future-looking industry here and a need to look at how we can support the next industry, whether it’s green skills, the tourism sector and visitor economy or a blend of both.
“The scale of the project has the capacity to do all of that, which why I find it really exciting, because you don’t find many projects like this. For people like me, the impact potential is one of the things that’s the most interesting.”
Cyfarthfa Castle currently remains open to the public, offering days out that include history, art and the chance to explore the park with its miniature railway, lake, bothy, playground, cafés, country and garden walks and more. But a vision is emerging of something even bigger and better and Anna is pleased that things are now moving forward.
“Great things have happened since the publication of the plan – there’s a fully-formed charity, staff are joining us and we’re starting to really look at what the realistic delivery for this amazing visionary plan is.
“Now we’ve got to define exactly what we want to deliver, why it’s worth funding and what the impact is going to be. We’ve got to demonstrate that the people that we’re doing this for are involved in the decision making and helping us to design it, rather than it just being done to people. In my last project, that approach worked.”
She feels the site is ideally suited to house the new National Contemporary Art Gallery for Wales, but whatever happens with their bid, it’s certain that big changes are afoot for Cyfarthfa.
“Our bid to house the national gallery is one piece of the puzzle,” she says. “The plan is also about other aspects such as heritage, nature and the environment. I’m very excited about the next six months, because I think by the end of this year, if not a bit earlier, we should be able to lay out the plan in a much more defined way so that people can really start to get behind it.
“At the moment, it’s at the big idea stage. The next step is to make it tangible and to be able to actually show people what we want to do in our first three projects and ask them how they feel about it.
“One of the most fun aspects of this is bringing people into it.”
