The Valleys Project
The systematic dismantling of the British heavy industries began in the late 1970s and throughout the decade of the 1980s. These wholesale closures resulted in many bitter industrial disputes with the then Conservative government. In South Wales the process started with the national steel strikes of 1980 and would culminate with the bitter dispute of the miners’ strike of 1984. South Wales, with its long history of heavy industry and political unrest , was hit particularly hard. By March 1985 the strike against pit closures was over, Margaret Thatcher (then British Prime Minister) was victorious and the miners made a reluctant but dignified return to work. What followed was a total closure of pits and the jobless miners of South Wales joined the ranks of the unemployed.
The Welsh Development Agency (WDA) was a government organisation established to help regenerate the region and find a solution to the problems of high unemployment. Via a process of tax breaks, free rents and an available pool of labour, the WDA began to attract a new generation of industry to the region. On the sites of former collieries and on new industrial parks on the edges of towns, huge tin shed factories began to appear. Their purpose? To house the manufacturing processes for the newly emerging computer industry.
But this was an industry for a new age, with different ideas about who made a good employee. They wanted to employ mainly women (who they claimed were best suited to the intricate assembly of electronic circuit boards) and they also wanted a workforce with no previous experience of work, one which had not been unionised. Thatcher’s emasculation of the trade union movement made this not only possible but increasingly desirable to employers.
Paradoxically, an industry created to solve the unemployment of a predominantly male former workforce resulted in the employment of the wives and daughters of redundant miners and steel workers. These men, who had historically been the breadwinners, were now staying at home and women of the household were going out to work. At the time this was a large sociological shift in the region.
In addition to the changing sociological patterns, there were also distinct changes to the landscape occurring, as areas were levelled in preparation for the construction of factories and new roads introduced to improve communication routes from the M4 motorway to the valleys.
![[16x20] Valleys Landscape Ebw Vale 001.jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ef25c3a76474f270a3bd736/1593518280099-V10ZK7LWVYZ0QNJDXCC4/%5B16x20%5D+Valleys+Landscape+Ebw+Vale+001.jpg)
