Blaenavon Industrial Landscape
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How it came to be
At the end of the 18th century Thomas Hill, Thomas Hopkins and Benjamin Pratt invested £40,000 in an ironworks with three blast furnaces at Blaenavon in South Wales. Hopkins brought skilled workers from a forge in Staffordshire. The ironworks drove the mining and settlement of the whole area.
Pig iron output in the region rose from 39,600 tons in 1796 to 666,000 tons in 1852. The ironmasters built St Peter's Church in 1804, Sarah Hopkins founded a school in 1816, and in 1839 a water balance tower was built. In 1894 the Workmen's Hall went up, paid for by the workers' own subscriptions.
The ironworks shut down at the start of the 20th century, and Big Pit, worked from about 1860, stopped producing coal in 1980. It reopened as a museum in 1983. The late 18th-century furnaces are described as the best preserved of their period in the United Kingdom, and the landscape was inscribed in 2000.
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