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The family home of the Thomas family from 1914. Dylan was born in the front bedroom on October 27th 1914 and spent his first 20 years living at the house. It was in this house that Dylan wrote a large proportion of the poems that would make up his first three published collections, recording them in a series of notebooks. Dylan took lodgings in London in November 1934 but returned frequently to the family home until 1937 when his parents moved to a smaller house at Bishopston. The house was finally sold in 1943. By the 1990s the house was languishing as a student bedsit before being painstakingly restored by Geoff and Annie Haden to replicate how it would have looked during Dylan’s time at the house. Dylan’s tiny bedroom has been carefully re-created from descriptions and clues in his letters and writings. The house is open for tours, stays and as an events venue.

In my untidy bedroom, surrounded with books and papers, full of the unhealthy smell of very bad tobacco, I sit and write.

© West Glamorgan Archive Service

Dylan attended the Grammar School on Mount Pleasant from September 1925 to 1931. His father David John (D.J.) Thomas was the Senior English master at the school, having been at the school since 1901. Dylan was not an academically successful pupil, he excelled in English but failed to apply himself in other disciplines. He did find success in the debating and dramatic societies, and went on to edit the School Magazine that had published some of his earliest poems. He was also a good athlete, winning cross-country races including the under 15 school mile in 1926. The school was bombed during the second world war and after the war relocated to Sketty as Bishop Gore School.

Dylan recalled his school days in his 1947 broadcast Return Journey

…appeared regularly in detention classes, hid in the cloakroom during algebra, was, when a newcomer, thrown into the bushes of the Lower Playground by bigger boys, and threw newcomers into the bushes of the Lower Playground when he was a bigger boy; he scuffled at prayers, he interpolated, smugly, the time-honoured wrong irreverent words into the morning hymns, he helped to damage the headmaster’s rhubarb, was thirty-third in trigonometry, and, as might be expected, edited the School Magazine.”

Swansea centre

© West Glamorgan Archive Service

Dylan’s home town of Swansea; now the second largest city in Wales. The Swansea town centre that Dylan was familiar with was largely destroyed during the second world war when the German Luftwaffe carried out a three-night blitz of the town in February 1941; or destroyed later by civic redevelopment. Forty-one acres of the town were obliterated, and no less than eight hundred and fifty seven premises were destroyed. Two hundred and thirty people were killed, four hundred and nine injured, and seven thousand were left homeless. Stopped clocks showed the times the bombs fell. Buildings surviving from Dylan’s days include the No Sign Bar in Wind Street, the No 10 in Union Street, The Three Lamps in Castle Square, and The Queen’s Hotel in Gloucester Place.

Swansea after the blitz

© West Glamorgan Archive Service

Dylan’s 1947 radio broadcast Return Journey takes a nostalgic journey through the Swansea of Dylan’s memory.

I went out of the hotel into the snow and walked down High Street, past the flat white wastes where all the shops had been. Eddershaw Furnishers, Curry’s Bicycles, Donegal Clothing Company, Doctor Scholl’s, Burton Tailors, WH Smith, Boots Cash Chemists, Leslie’s Stores, Upson’s Shoes, Prince of Wales, Tucker’s Fish, Stead & Simpson – all the shops bombed and vanished. Past the hole in space where Hodges the Clothiers had been, down Castle Street, past the remembered, invisible shops…(from Return Journey)

Today Swansea celebrates its famous son with a number of tributes including the Dylan Thomas Centre, Dylan Thomas Theatre, and statues of Dylan and Captain Cat in the Maritime Quarter.

Dylan’s home suburb, Uplands, is on the western side of Swansea and encompasses Dylan’s birthplace in Cwmdonkin Drive, his childhood playground Cwmdonkin Park, and his first school in Mirador Crescent. Centred around Uplands Crescent, the area houses shops, restaurants and bars, and today hosts the annual Dylan Thomas inspired Do Not Go Gentle Festival. In Dylan’s day the area was an up and coming residential district favoured by the middle-class. Dylan was a regular at the Uplands Cinema on Glanmor Road which was demolished to make way for Lloyds Bank, and the Uplands Hotel (now the Uplands Tavern) was Dylan’s first local.

©Jaggery and licensed for reuse under this creative commons license.

St Thomas, a suburban district close to the docks on the eastern side of Swansea, was, in Dylan’s day a mainly working class area. Dylan’s mother Florence Hannah Williams was born here at 29 Delhi Street in 1882. The house is still standing.

Dylan would have been a visitor to his Aunt Polly and Uncle Bob who lived in St Thomas before moving to Blaencwm in Carmarthenshire.

But George had never left home for more than a night; and then, he told me, one half-holiday when it was raining and there was nothing to do but stay in the wash-house racing his guineapigs giddily along the benches, it was only to stay in St Thomas, three miles from his house, with an aunt who could see through the walls and who knew what a Mrs Hoskin was doing in the kitchen. (From Extraordinary Little Cough)