#phoenixcentre — Public Fediverse posts

SWANSEA: Three more skateparks open as £3m wheeled sports drive rolls on

Skaters and BMX riders have wasted no time getting on three new wheeled sports parks that have just opened across Swansea.

The biggest is a street plaza-style park at Victoria Park, joined by upgraded sites at the Phoenix Centre in Townhill and Mynydd Newydd in Penlan.

All three were being ridden before anyone had cut a ribbon — the official openings aren’t due until later this summer.

They are the latest sites to land under Swansea Council‘s £3 million spend on skate, BMX and scooter facilities, a programme riders themselves pushed for over several years.

The council says the goal is to put most residents within two miles of somewhere to skate or ride.

The Victoria Park plaza is the standout. Work there has been tracked from the first diggers on site through to its promised spring opening, and it has now opened its gates.

The designs were drawn up by specialist firm Curve Studio, with the building work handed to contractors Wheelscape, Bendcrete Leisure and Canvas Spaces.

Cllr Andrew Stevens, the council’s cabinet member for environment and infrastructure, said the early turnout showed the parks were hitting the mark.

“This investment is about creating welcoming, high-quality places where people of all ages can be active, develop skills and enjoy modern facilities close to home,” he said.

Council leader Rob Stewart was also at Victoria Park to see the new plaza in use.

The three openings follow upgrades already finished at Coed Bach in Pontarddulais and Melin Mynach in Gorseinon.

They build on years of lobbying by local riders, who backed the spending as a way to grow the sport and give young people somewhere to go.

There is plenty still in the pipeline. A BMX-focused park is planned for the Elba sports complex in Gowerton, with a small cycling track in Blaen-y-maes, a new pump track in Bishopston and a refurbished one at Clyne Valley.

A junior pump track is lined up for Gorseinon and a skatepark for Ynystawe Park — both shown off in design form late last year.

Further schemes include dirt tracks at Coed Gwilym Park in Clydach and Coed Bach Park in Pontarddulais, plus pump tracks at Morriston Park, Heol Las Park in Birchgrove, Maesteg Park in St Thomas and the SA1 Prince of Wales Dock.

The whole drive sits inside the council’s wider £11m spend on play areas and recreation since the pandemic, paid for through ward budgets, the Community Investment Fund, town and community council money and Welsh Government active travel grants.

It all comes shortly after skaters, families and PCSOs got together for a community paint day at Mumbles skatepark, brightening up the ramps with their own designs.

Related stories from Swansea Bay News

New Victoria Park skate plaza on track for spring opening
How the city’s flagship new street-plaza facility took shape.

New BMX and skatepark designs revealed for Gowerton and Ynystawe
A look at two of the sites still to come under the programme.

Council announces £11m investment in play areas and wheeled sports facilities
The wider recreation spending the skatepark drive sits within.

Skaters and PCSOs give Mumbles skatepark a colourful makeover
A community paint day brightens up the ramps.

TOWNHILL: ‘A beacon of what good community work looks like’ — the Phoenix Centre at 25, through the eyes of one of its own

For 25 years, the Phoenix Centre has sat at the heart of Townhill — a community hub that has weathered the estate’s hardest moments and quietly shaped countless lives.

As the centre marks its anniversary, few people embody its story better than Zoe Murphy: born and raised on the hill, a University of Wales Trinity Saint David graduate, and now a project coordinator at the very centre she first walked into as a young dance teacher.

Run by the Hill Community Development Trust, the Phoenix is a social enterprise that ploughs any profit back into the community. It was set up to tackle poverty and drive regeneration on one of Wales’s first purpose-built council estates.

For Murphy, it has been a thread running through her whole adult life.

She became a mother at 18 but never let go of her ambition to go to university — and found her chance close to home, at what was then the Swansea Institute of Higher Education, now UWTSD, which had a campus in Townhill at the time.

“I was very academic, so going to university was always part of the plan — it was just about finding a way to make it work,” she said. “With a campus based in Townhill at the time, accessing education within my own community made all the difference while raising my daughter.”

She graduated in 2002 with a degree in English Studies, Drama and Media — a course that chimed with her love of storytelling and performance — while already running a successful dance school locally.

She remembers her student years as “one of the happiest times” of her life, and a foundation for the freelance work that still shapes her practice today.

Her career since has never followed a single track. She began in dance — teaching, choreographing and creating dance theatre — before moving into community arts and engagement.

“That’s where I really developed my voice as an artist,” she said.

A city-wide community dance project later reconnected her with UWTSD, leading to six years working in community engagement at the university. She has also worked across schools, children’s residential care, prisons and work-based learning, and in 2018 completed a qualification in Post Compulsory Education and Training.

Her bond with the Phoenix spans much of her life. She used the centre for her dance classes when it first opened, as well as for social activities and community events — so when she joined the organisation in 2025 as a project coordinator, it felt like a natural continuation of a relationship stretching back a quarter of a century.

In her current role she runs the weekly youth club, coordinates community groups and helps develop local events.

“I really believe in the power the centre has,” she said. “It’s in the heart of Townhill, and I see the hard graft it takes to keep it going and its absolute importance to our community.”

For Murphy, the work is personal. She is acutely aware of the negative perceptions that have dogged the area — perceptions she says miss the truth of the place.

“What I’ve experienced growing up and working here is strength, compassion, and a real sense of people looking out for each other,” she said. “There’s a strong identity here, and a pride that people don’t always see from the outside.”

That pride was tested five years ago. In May 2021, Mayhill made national headlines after two hours of violent disorder in which cars were torched and homes attacked, drawing condemnation from the then home secretary and the label “war zone.”

Eighteen people were later jailed for a combined total of more than 83 years, with South Wales Police later apologising for its handling of the night after an independent report. But residents have always pointed to what came next — neighbours pouring out to clear up and support those who had been targeted — as the truer picture of the hill.

In the aftermath, the council announced major investment in the area, covering sport and youth facilities, roads and the environment, and an independent review was set up to support the community.

The Phoenix has remained a constant through it all. The centre features in a new report by the Wales Centre for Public Policy examining poverty stigma in Swansea and the role of local services, and was visited recently by BBC Wales as part of its reporting on life on the estate.

It is far from the centre’s first turn in the spotlight for the right reasons. In 2024 it added a new play area for local children — one of a steady stream of community-led improvements that have made it, in our own past reporting, one of Swansea’s busiest and most vibrant community centres.

Murphy sees the 25th anniversary as a moment to reflect — and a reminder of what the centre has meant to Townhill and neighbouring Mayhill since it opened at a time of real need.

“Spaces like that don’t last 25 years without commitment, and without people believing in what it offers,” she said.

She is clear, too, that the work depends on sustained support.

“Places like the Phoenix Centre show what’s possible when communities are properly resourced,” she said. “It shouldn’t be the exception.”

For her, the centre stands as “a beacon of what good community work looks like, and what can happen when people are given the space and support to make something work.”

Murphy, who also writes, captured the spirit of the estate in a poem composed for the centre’s anniversary. Titled “The Hill Dwellers,” it turns the outside world’s assumptions on their head — closing on a line of defiant belonging.

The Hill Dwellers

by Zoe Murphy

Rows of houses lean into the sky,
weathered like the women who walk beneath them,
strong-backed, sharp-tongued,
kind when it counts.

We live close here.
Close like window to window,
door to door,
life to life.
Somewhere, sprayed on the wall outside No. 14:
“Babe, you look so cool.”
A sentence left hanging,
like laundry, like meaning.

This place is not perfect.
It peels and shouts and forgets itself sometimes.
There’s history in these bricks.
And it’s ours.

A single mum with a house full of noise —
music upstairs, laundry on radiators,
takeaway wrappers and late-night advice
they pretend not to hear.

Graffiti blooms on the bus stop glass,
a whisper in scarlet: “Babe, you look so cool.”
A love letter in a place no one’s meant to look,
proof that someone once felt something
loud enough to scrawl it softly.
Someone needed to say it —
and someone else needed to hear it.

The Hill Dwellers,
holding routines, rain and tea.
From here we see it all —
the backs of buildings,
the weather rolling in.
We carry our lives up these slopes:
shopping bags, heartbreak, school shoes,
bits of gossip tucked in pockets,
a line someone once wrote
still tucked in my head some mornings
when the fog sits low.
We are above, not below.
We belong.
Babe, you look so cool.

Related stories from Swansea Bay News

Eighteen people jailed for their part in Mayhill riot
The sentences handed down after the 2021 disorder that made national headlines.

Independent review set up to support Mayhill and Waun Wen after riot
The panel established to help the community recover in the wake of the unrest.

Council leader announces major new investment in Mayhill
Funding for sport, youth facilities, roads and the environment on the estate.

Children thrilled by Townhill’s new play area
A new play space at the Phoenix Centre, one of the city’s busiest community hubs.