Book review: – Ponty Is It? Travels in a Valleys Town by Daryl Leeworthy

Peter Finch

Daryl Leeworthy’s highly entertaining new Parthian title is a personal ramble around the town where he lives. It embraces community, topography, history, glory, difficulty and wonder. Ponty, glowing where the Taff and the Rhondda meet. The capital of Wales might have been better off situated here. Daryl doesn’t make that claim. I do.

Where rivers meet

Pontypridd is this year’s venue for the National Eisteddfod which will dominate the town’s centrepiece, Ynysangharad War Memorial Park. Daryl’s book appears with apposite timing. Ponty is the gateway to the Valleys. Its head and heart. Say Ponty to most people and they’ll know you mean Pridd rather than Pool, Cymer or Clun. In this place two great rivers meet – The Rhondda and the Taff. You can see their waters churning together if you stand in the centre of one of the Park’s entrance bridges behind what was once M&S. ‘That’s the most important spot in the history of modern Wales’, Daryl once told me, pointing at the gurgling ruck in the grey waters, the meeting place of the ‘The Klondike and the Silicon Valleys of their day’.

Daryl’s introduction to the town spreads it wide, running north to Ynysybwl and then south to the far distant edge of Treforest.  The bigger you make a place, of course, then the larger your potential sales will be. To cover the territory Daryl takes buses and trains but mostly he walks. Rambles. Meets people, fills his pages entertainingly with a mixture of discovery, unearthed history and recollection.

Leeworthy isn’t Welsh, a fact he lays down in his first chapters. He was born in the West Country but moved to Wales, Ynysybwl, a mile and a half to Ponty’s north, at a young age. Early enough, it seems, to take on the country as his own.  ‘My roots on earth are these’ he says. The Pontypridd he discovered ‘lay at the heartland of American Wales.’  This was somewhere ‘where making money, self-invention, and being modern mattered a great deal’. Capitalist magic.

Republican

Leeworthy is a self-declared republican who does not believe in monarchy as a system of government. He says this despite then giving us three pages on how he felt on hearing of the death of HMQ and what he thought of the funeral that followed.

But it’s this mix of recounted history, personal experience and journalistic reporting that makes the book such a thoroughly entertaining ride.  It’s hard to work out where you are sometimes.  There is no index, there are no maps, and there’s little logic to his looping traverse.  But somehow this doesn’t matter.

Conversations

I enjoyed the conversations he has with friends, residents and passers by.  I also enjoyed his recollections of literary times past, of those great Ponty authors, Alun Richards, genius of the short story, and Meic Stephens, creator of the graffiti Cofiwch Dryweryn.  His net is cast wide – he visits to the Grogg shop, Upper Boat, Tonteg, and then the sites of the mines that once encircled the town to the exclusion of all else.

In the town centre he celebrates his favourite bookshop, Storyville, and the Mill Street Quarter’s position on the left bank of the Taff as ‘Ideal for organising Les Philosophes de Ponty.’  He encounters the fountain, waterless, built to a design by Charles B. Fowler of Cardiff, winner out of thirty entries to a competition from 1895, full of Celtic symbolism but manufactured in Cheltenham. And then the sites of the cinema, of the synagogue and the more recently lost electronics store Tandy.

In urban areas things can change rapidly sometimes. Daryl reports on that post-industrial town regular: regeneration. This means he discovers, ‘knocking stuff down and putting in some benches’.

‘Smiths (opened 1984, gone), Woolies (opened 1921, gone), Marks and Spencer (opened 1939, gone), Burton’s (opened 1926, gone), and associated banks (gone), restaurants (gone), and cafes (gone), What’s left? Poundland, B&M, some phone shops, and a branch of Cortile Coffee.’

Eateries

He does the town’s eateries well – the myriad Italian cafes, many still extant and serving some of the best cakes on the planet.   He also visits Clwb y Bont, a place I once dubbed as ‘the soggy-carpeted heart of patriotic Wales’. In this dark building on the edge of the river, accessed via a side alley from Taff Street, early patrons ‘came not only to drink and listen to folk and trad music but also to learn Welsh, to lose weight, to play chess, to heckle any posse of poets who visited, and to campaign for social change.’  There is an air of those aims still around with ‘campaigners ready to fill your pockets with leaflets about climate change, the dangers of nuclear weapons, or, as happened in 2002, a ‘festival of republican celebration’’.  This is Labour Country, as Daryl discovered in his research for an earlier book of his of the same name.  If not that then a hotbed of Yes Cymru or full-blooded Plaid nationalistics. Certainly not Tory.

Does this all make a decent introduction to CF37, Southern Gateway as the local council now want to dub it, Pont y tŷ pridd?  It does that.  There’s enough in here to keep both visitor and local completely engaged.  Ponty like it is. From his descriptions it’s also almost possible to follow the author’s walking routes too, if you’ve a mind.  When lost Daryl uses the maps on his phone to find where he is. And since, as I’ve already reported, this book lacks actual mapping, Google Earth is what we’ll all use too.

Ponty Is It? Travels in a Valleys Town by Daryl Leeworthy is published by Parthian. It is available from all good bookshops.

Peter Finch is a poet and literary entrepreneur. His credits include bookselling, publishing, editing, writing and running a literary promotion agency. He is the editor of The Real Wales series published by Seren books and has written extensively about the psychogeography of Cardiff in the trilogy of Real Cardiff.