A Welsh Landscape through Time: excavations at Park Cybi, Holy Island, Anglesey

Abstract

accommodate Birmingham overspill. Epithets like Tetlograd (from the surname of the planning official) and ‘O21ers’ to describe the migrant population (from the Birmingham telephone dialling code) suggest that Tamworth is the ideal place to study the evolution of the landscapes and townscapes in which we live. Earlier it is the significance of water and woodland which seems to have played a major role for Tamworth. The proximity of Cannock Chase, Hopwas Hay included in this volume, and the Forest of Ardern attracted lordly interest for its access to hunting, but water determined its more local history. Tamworth sits in an elevated position above the confluence of the meandering rivers Tame and Anker in a low-lying river plain. All of the townships here are riverine landscapes, a territory of bridges, mills and floods, the most significant in 1795 but still, as in 2007, a danger. In a town of essentially small traders its early industries were also those greedy for water, including linen, paper and cotton, the last significant in the area’s industrial history in the nineteenth century. The townscape was mostly timber-framed, newly built in brick in the 1690s, but is now one of vast housing estates from the 1960s and later. Despite its medieval church and castle, it is six fifteen-storey high rise blocks, ‘Riverside’, which shape distant views. The planning of urban expansion after the 1952 Town Development Act to accommodate Birmingham overspill tenants increased population from less than 13,000 to nearly 65,000 by 1981, although fewer than 140 private homes were built by 1965. The landscape of vast overspill estates embraced most of the post-war housing styles, and, in view of resistance to exporting jobs from Birmingham with its people, hastened modern commuting patterns over walk-to-work towns. Such building transformed the town’s southern outer townships, although a band of coal and clay had already given many of them an industrial character different from Tamworth itself. Collieries and brick works in the nineteenth century in Wilnecote were joined by the Reliant car factory from 1934 to the 1990s, whereas Fazeley attracted Robert Peel’s cotton mill from 1790. Tamworth’s watery world had inhibited economic development, but traffic along Watling Street which ran through several of these townships seems to have been significant. The Peel family’s involvement in Fazeley also accounts for the inclusion of Drayton Bassett, purchased in 1790. The manor was always rural and in the Middle Ages was largely held as parkland by the Bassett family and that land use has persisted. The Peel family built their own manor and park in the east of the parish at Drayton swallowing its medieval predecessor. It is now a major theme park, the last stage in a landscape of leisure.