Archaeological discoveries force rethink of landmark restoration project

Richard Youle, Local Democracy Reporter

Archaeological remains revealed at a former copperworks have given designers of a new building on the site a big challenge.

Remains of wheel pits, rolling mill trenches ,and furnace and chimney bases – some potentially up to 200 years old – have been found at the site of the Vivian and Musgrave engine houses at Hafod-Morfa Copperworks in Swansea.

They’ve been located along with unidentified features during excavation work for a project to restore the two engine houses and construct a new link building between them.

The upshot is that to reduce the risk of subsidence and damage to these remains the foundation for the link building needs to be changed from a raft-slab design to a technique called micro-piling.

Project designers plan to drill 93 individually-positioned micro-piles 16m deep into the ground to support the link building slab. The area has been backfilled with graded sand.

Council officer Stephen Smith told Swansea’s planning committee: “The ground was basically too soft in some areas and too hard in other areas. So the result would have been subsidence in the new link building, which nobody wants to happen, and also potentially that compression of the ground would damage this internationally-important archaeology.”

The committee previously approved a council application to restore the Grade II-listed engine houses and create the link building with the revamped site being suitable for restaurant, cafe, retail, and exhibition uses.

At the meeting on July 7 the committee voted in favour of a further application to vary a condition attached to the original listed building consent to reflect what’s known now. A separate application for scheduled monument consent has been submitted to Welsh heritage body Cadw.

Committee members said they looked forward to the site being brought back into use. Cllr Allan Jeffery said he’d been on a boat trip on the adjacent River Tawe the day before the meeting and that passengers were very keen to see the completed project.

The Vivian engine house was built around 1860 and the Musgrave engine house 50 years later. A UK Government grant has been secured for the scheme.