| Above: Mount Pleasant in the early 1990s. Looking east
with St Judes church on the skyline. A City Mini bus struggles up the hill (lower
centre) |
Most of the Mount Pleasant houses are of the typical
speculative design that builders preferred at the end of the nineteenth century. A three
bedroom terrace with a tunnelback extension to house a scullery and wc and coal house was
popular with the more affluent white collar trades people. It was a safe design for
Victorian builders, they knew there was a ready market for such houses, and variations of
the design are found all across the country. The design had the added advantage of being
very compact thus increasing potential profits for the builders and developers as they
could cram large numbers of houses into very small plots, a typical development being 33
houses per acre. The builders were very careful to
recognise the trades and crafts of potential buyers of their houses. Street corner
properties (of which there were many due to the characteristics of the byelaw gridiron
layout), were built to a larger pattern to accommodate shops and storehouses. Whereas
earlier types of Swansea urban street would show ordinary houses converted into small
shops, the Mount Pleasant estate corner properties were designed as shops
for the local community. Thus, much needed community infrastructure was built in to
the design. The surviving evidence from directories and people’s reminiscences
suggests that the street corner trading on the estate was successful almost from the day
that the shops were built, building up to an incredible array of commercial properties
integrated in to the residential streets. The shop system survived until the mid-1960s
when the arrival of town based supermarkets started to compete with the old style stores
which were gradually squeezed out of existence.
The southern part of the estate was steeper than the north and
had also experienced a degree of stone quarrying. This meant that there were some steep
gradients to be negotiated in the building of the streets. Thus, some of the houses have
three floors on the downhill side (a typical Welsh building style), often built as a house
above and a basement flat below. |