(All images by: Richard Szwejkowski; the abandoned St Athan Boys’ Village, South Wales)
In South Wales’ picturesque Vale of Glamorgan, near the industrial village of West Aberthaw, stands an abandoned holiday camp from the 1920s, its crumbling buildings an eerily evocative relic of days gone by and a sign of more recent times. St Athan Boys’ Village was opened in August 1925 to offer the sons of miners an escape for the choking pollution of the South Wales Coalfield. Today, it’s a ghost town of derelict, overgrown grounds and heavily vandalised, abandoned buildings.
The now abandoned St Athan Boys’ Village was a joint venture between David Davies, 1st Baron Davies – a prominent Welsh Liberal Party politician and grandson of a wealthy industrialist – as well as the president of Ocean Coal Company and its welfare officer Captain J. Glynn Jones.
The men are understood to have attended a youth camp in Kent, England, and decided to launch their own initiative to enable the children of industrial families to run free amid the clean, crisp sea air near the beaches of the Bristol Channel.
Looking at the abandoned holiday camp today, you’d be forgiven for interpreting the site as an odd mixture of forlorn 1920s low-rise structures punctuated by bland 1960s style blocks, alongside the empty shells of 1940s wartime barracks. The abandoned St Athan Boys’ Village is, in essence, all of those things, having been added to and repurposed for various functions as the years rolled by.
During World War Two the Boys’ Village was requisitioned for military use, but had been handed back to the local community by 1946. At the heart of the complex, a grand war memorial built in the Art Deco style commemorated those men of the South Wales Coalfields who were killed in action during the two world wars.
At the height of its popularity, the Welsh holiday camp boasted a dining hall, workshops and dormitories alongside tennis courts, football and rugby pitches, a swimming pool, putting green and a full-size cricket pitch with its own pavilion. Perhaps the most noticeable building, its simple yet elegant tower rising above the other structures, was the village church, which still dominates the site today.
By 1962 the complex had been renovated as a youth hostel, and skills like mechanical engineering were taught at the Aberthaw site. But as the decades past, a combination of cheap flights to warmer holiday destinations and the decline of coal mining in South Wales spelled the beginning of the end. By 1990 the camp’s parent organisation, the Boys’ Club of Wales, had gone into administration.
If the writing was on the wall then, it certainly is now. The St Athan Boys’ Village has been heavily vandalised over the years. Anything worth stealing has been taken, buildings stand thoroughly gutted and some have been arsoned. The swimming pool roof, which had long collapsed, has now been removed for safety reasons, leaving the empty, decaying pool open to the elements. Other decaying buildings have been demolished.
Though the abandoned holiday complex has changed hands several times since its closure, change has been a long time coming. Attempts to shore the site up with security fencing also failed – when the metal gates were themselves vandalised and looted. As of 2013, it’s understood that the site has been divided into separate buildings plots, and some of the surviving structures are set to be converted for residential use.
But amid the sea of change, devastation and ill-fortune, as the melancholy ghost town crumbles around it, the war memorial at the centre of the complex has also fallen victims to vandals. These photographs reveal a sad scene, the ghost of a village that once offered youngsters time away from the back-breaking work of the mines, now derelict and apparently unnecessary in 21st century Britain.
As the Independent wrote: “The boys have long gone from St Athan Boys’ Village. Its dormitories, church and the canteen that fed 200 boisterous young colliers enjoying a free holiday are now burnt and dilapidated. The ruin, on a windswept plot near Barry, south Wales, is the only known monument to a unique experiment aimed at giving teenagers a respite from doing the work of men, six days a week, in the filthy blackness of their country’s coal mines.”
(All images by: Richard Szwejkowski; vandalised war memorial at the abandoned St Athan Boys’ Village)
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