| These two maps show the suburb of
Greenhill in Swansea. Nowadays, the area has mostly disappeared under
the road junction at Dyfatty. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century, the area was becoming an increasingly popular suburb, mainly
due to its location immediately north of the town and south of the
industrial developments at Hafod and Landore. There are approximately
eighty years between the two plans. The area was well known for cheap
low class housing and many immigrants settled in Greenhill in the 1840s,
most famously the Irish who tended to dominate in the population for
almost a century.
The high density of housing was exacerbated by the extreme poverty of
the inhabitants, who were often obliged to take in lodgers thus
increasing the population density to disastrous proportions. The lack of
a safe sanitation system, the tendency to use the local streams as water
supplies, and the large number of children in the households meant that
Greenhill suffered badly in Cholera
epidemics. |