#swanseacouncil — Public Fediverse posts
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LITTLE WIND STREET: Makeover approved for Swansea’s nightlife lane
The blue and yellow murals on Little Wind Street are coming off. Swansea Council has approved a makeover of the lane between Wind Street and York Street that strips the 2015 paintwork back to brick, hangs strings of light overhead and puts a steel gateway arch across the York Street end.
The applicant, Greenridge Swansea Propco Limited, which owns The City Gates block, says in its planning statement that the street “now looks tired” and that three of its units were empty when the plans went in. Its aim is to make the lane “a destination” rather than “a service access road”.
The arch the council sent back
The first version of the arch, drawn in October 2024, was clad to look like stone. The council’s placemaking team told the architects, Rio, that its “apparent solid form” risked being “a pastiche of structural stone construction”, and asked for a metal skeleton instead.
What was approved is bare welded steel in a corroded-metal finish, about 7.45 metres tall with a four-metre gap beneath for fire engines, “Little Wind Street” lettered across the top and CNC-cut panels backlit at night. A smaller matching arch sits beside it. The council’s heritage lead called the redesign “welcomed in particular”.
The arch the council sent back, left, and the steel skeleton it approved, right (Image: Rio Architects / Greenridge Swansea Propco)Lights, blades and a wall of colour
The old street poles go, replaced by lights mounted on the buildings and strung across the lane. Arup, the lighting designers, had to swap the uplighters for downlighters after the council’s ecologist warned that upward light “is detrimental to bats and night-flying birds”.
Strings of light overhead replace the street poles, with planters and seating along the lane (Image: Rio Architects / Greenridge Swansea Propco)Around the roof of the nightclub at Unit 17, a “shroud” of vertical blades in alternating colours hides the extractor plant. At the southern end a multi-coloured corrugated wall covers the blank side of York Chambers, and raised planters with built-in benches mark out spill-out seating for the bars.
The ‘feature shroud’ of coloured blades around the nightclub roof, built to hide the extractor plant (Image: Rio Architects / Greenridge Swansea Propco)Hops for the brewery, water for the Tawe
The patterned panels on the walls carry a hops symbol, for the Hancock’s Brewery that stood on the east side of the lane into the 20th century, and a water symbol for the River Tawe. The chevrons, spirals and dots around them are borrowed from Norman and Viking art; the applicant’s research says the lane may pre-date the castle.
Information panels on the wayfinding posts are meant to explain all this to anyone standing outside Bunkers at midnight.
Raised planters with built-in seating, and the patterned panels carrying the hops and water symbols (Image: Rio Architects / Greenridge Swansea Propco)What the council checked
Nobody objected: the site notice drew no public responses. Highways worried about deliveries until the landlord confirmed a layby stays, and the placemaking officer said the scheme fits the emerging plan for the city centre’s lanes, while asking, without requiring, for a green wall on the big blank facade.
Approval under delegated powers comes with four conditions, one of them that the planters are RAL 7012 Basalt Grey, after an officer spotted a different grey on the drawings. Work must start within five years; no date or cost is given. Tenants’ signs need separate advertisement consent.
Who is on the lane
The Swansea Jack opened here last November as the club’s official sports bar, with a Premier Inn on the floors above and Bunkers on the Victoria Road corner. The block was built in 2006 and 2007 as Salubrious Place and renamed The City Gates in 2015, the same year the landlord painted the murals it is now removing.
Looking towards the Bunkers corner, with new signage bands and wall lights on the refreshed facades (Image: Rio Architects / Greenridge Swansea Propco)The corner of the city that is all building site
Little Wind Street is the part the council’s own scheme never reached. When the £3m Wind Street upgrade was nearing completion in 2021, council leader Rob Stewart said the authority was “also looking at making lanes and alleys connecting to Wind Street cleaner and safer spaces”. Four years on, it is the landlord doing it.
From the new arch, York Street runs down to the site where the St David’s car park has just been flattened for the Porth Copr offices, and at the other end of Wind Street Castle Square is a building site until late 2027, when its two cafe pavilions and big screen are due to open.
Related stories from Swansea Bay News
Swans legends and city dignitaries mark opening of The Swansea Jack sports bar
The club’s official bar, on Little Wind Street since November.SWANSEA: St David’s car park all but gone as diggers chew through the last of the decks
The site at the bottom of York Street, cleared for Porth Copr.CASTLE SQUARE: New images show the copper and stone pavilions, as opening slips to the second half of 2027
The council’s own scheme at the top of Wind Street.New video shows Wind Street’s future
The 2021 fly-through of the council’s £3m upgrade, and the promise about the lanes.Wind Street
#LittleWindStreet #planningApplication #Swansea #SwanseaCouncil #WindStreet
Every story from the city’s best-known street. -
LITTER: You could be fined for rubbish thrown from your car even if you weren’t in it, and fly-tippers could face £5,000
If a burger box flies out of your car window on the M4 and a council officer sees it, you could be the one who pays: whether you threw it, your passenger did, or you were not in the car at all. That is the change the Welsh Government is asking about, and it wants answers by 14 October.
The same consultation asks whether the maximum on-the-spot fine for fly-tipping should rise from £400 to £5,000, and whether the fine for handing your rubbish to an unlicensed man with a van should go from £300 to £400.
Why councils say their hands are tied
Throwing litter from a car is already a crime, with a fine of up to £2,500 in court. The problem, the government’s own paper says, is proving who did it: with two or more people in a moving car an officer often cannot tell, and the registered keeper does not have to say.
England already fines the keeper directly and Scotland is about to, as a civil penalty rather than a criminal one, so no court and no record. The paper admits Wales consulted on doing the same in 2017, found “strong support”, and then dropped the Bill that would have brought it in.
Llyr Gruffydd, the cabinet minister for rural resilience and sustainability, said: “It’s often impossible to prove who in a car threw litter out, so councils’ hands are tied even when they know it’s happened.”
Keep Wales Tidy surveys last year, quoted in the paper, found litter on nearly every main road in Wales: sweet wrappers on 81% of roads surveyed, drinks containers on 72% and fast-food packaging on 67%.
6,915 dumps, 103 fines
Councils in Swansea, Neath Port Talbot and Carmarthenshire recorded 6,915 fly-tipping incidents in 2024/25, according to Welsh Government figures, and issued 103 fixed penalty notices between them. That is one fine for every 67 dumps.
Swansea’s 2,860 incidents were up 15% on the year and 61% on four years ago, and 2,308 of them were on the roadside. The council issued 25 fixed penalties and, for the second year running, recorded no prosecutions in the official statistics; in March it told councillors it had dealt with 2,579 incidents and brought five prosecutions, a different count of the same year.
Neath Port Talbot’s 884 incidents were up 40% on 633 the year before, though still below the 1,102 of 2021/22. It issued 39 fixed penalties and prosecuted twice, and it is the council that crushes fly-tippers’ vans. In July a Morriston man who admitted dumping oil-covered car parts along two miles of road between Crynant and Cilfrew was fined £200, the same figure as the standard fixed penalty, plus costs.
The Dulais Valley dumping between Crynant and Cilfrew that ended in a £200 fine (Image: Neath Port Talbot Council)Carmarthenshire recorded 3,171 incidents, up 3% but well down from 4,803 four years ago, and prosecuted nine people, all of whom were fined, the third highest tally in Wales. Its fixed penalties fell from 149 to 39 in a year. Its new bin rulebook, signed off on Monday, sets out the ladder of letter, warden, notice and fine before anyone reaches court.
What a £5,000 fine would mean
Councils have told the government the £400 ceiling is no longer a deterrent, and in some cases costs less than getting rid of the rubbish legally. English councils can already fine up to £5,000, and Welsh councils have said the gap invites people to cross the border to dump. The £200 default would stay, the ceiling would rise, and councils would not have to use it.
Seven in ten fly-tips in Wales are household waste, black bags and the like, and in Swansea it is 72%. That is why the duty-of-care fine is going up too: if you pay someone to take your rubbish away and it ends up in a lane, the law says it is your problem.
Also in the paper
The proposals sit inside a wider white paper that would give ministers a legal duty to “rural proof” their policies. It names Carmarthenshire as one of nine rural councils in Wales; Swansea and Neath Port Talbot are not on the list. There are also tougher powers on illegal tree felling and civil fines for Natural Resources Wales to use.
The government says no decision has been made and no Bill has been drafted; it is asking for views and evidence first. The consultation is open until 14 October on the Welsh Government website.
“No-one likes litter,” Mr Gruffydd said. “Roadside rubbish makes an area unsightly, impacts our local economies and communities, and poses risks to the environment and to wildlife. I’d encourage everyone to give us their views and help us clean up our roadsides.”
Related stories from Swansea Bay News
Neath Port Talbot crushes fly-tippers’ vehicles as crackdown intensifies
The council seizing and destroying vans linked to illegal dumping.FLY-TIPPING: Morriston man must pay more than £1,400 after waste strewn along two miles of Dulais Valley road
A £200 fine for oil-covered car parts along a country road.STICKER SHOCK: Wrong bag, wrong day, and the new Carmarthenshire bin rules that can end in court
Letter, warden, notice, fine: the county’s enforcement ladder.Fly-tipping
#CarmarthenshireCouncil #flyTipping #KeepWalesTidy #litter #LlŷrGruffyddMS #NeathPortTalbotCouncil #SwanseaCouncil #WelshGovernment
Every prosecution and crackdown across south west Wales. -
ST HELEN’S: Floodlights on the ground, sand on the pitch and the old terrace stripped bare, 15 days from the first game
Fifteen days before the first rugby at the rebuilt St Helen’s, the new floodlights are lying on the pitch. Photographs taken at the ground on Tuesday by Paul Rogers show a galvanised column laid flat across the artificial surface, with fitters bolting the LED lamp heads to its crossarm before the whole thing is winched upright.
LED lamp heads going onto the crossarm before the column is raised (Image: Paul Rogers)Behind it, one of the old lattice pylons is still standing. The remains of another lie in sections by the pavilion.
The tallest of them, long said to be the tallest sports floodlight in Europe at 150ft, came down in June after more than 60 years, as the council set out the full £7.6m plan for the ground.
Sand on the new pitch
The artificial pitch is being finished. A spreader has been running up and down the surface pouring sand into the fibres, the infill that gives a 3G pitch its grip and its give, and by Tuesday a wide band of the field was buried in it.
The sand spreader passes the floodlight crew (Image: Paul Rogers)Kerbs are being laid along the paths around the pitch, and new galvanised rails have gone in behind the dead-ball line.
Steel on the seafront side
On the Mumbles Road side, the steelwork for the new stand is going up, with a telehandler and cherry pickers raising columns onto concrete pads. The club’s plan puts a new stand there, moves the existing stand to the Mumbles end and adds a fan zone at the Guildhall end, for a finished capacity just under 7,000.
It is a 1,000-seat stand, and it has a name before it has a crowd: JCP Solicitors signed a six-figure deal last week to call it the JCP Solicitors Stand until 2031, the club’s longest-dated commercial agreement since it left Bridgend.
Columns going up on concrete pads on the seafront sideA telehandler beside the new pitch, with columns waiting on the ground(Images: Paul Rogers)The old terrace, stripped to the steps
Across the pitch, the terrace on the Bryn Road side has been cleared back to its concrete steps. The rusted crush barriers have been cut out and stacked, new galvanised ones are already bolted in, and a mound of broken blockwork sits where the top of the terrace met the houses.
Weeds between the steps and the flaking yellow paint on the step edges give away how long it has stood empty.
The terrace cleared back to its concrete stepsOld crush barriers cut out, new ones already in, and the rubble at the top(Images: Paul Rogers)A row of faded orange and brown seats is still fixed along the rail at the top, next to a peeling sign whose message has half gone.
This is the terrace that will have no roof when the Ospreys move in. The club said last week that a covered terrace has been pushed to a later phase with no date, and offered terrace season members a seat in the Family Stand instead.
Sand going into the artificial surfaceThe old seats along the top of the terrace, and the sign that has seen better days(Images: Paul Rogers)What happens next
The first game is Gower College against Cardiff and Vale College at 2.30pm on Wednesday 7 October, with Swansea University against Bath that evening. Swansea RFC play Ebbw Vale on 10 October, 150 years after they first made the ground their home.
The Ospreys’ first match is against the Dragons at 7pm on Saturday 24 October, with Cardiff a week later. Tickets for the Dragons game went on sale at 10am on Tuesday, in a capped first allocation the club says will grow as “operational milestones and remaining venue approvals” are completed. Richard Lancaster, the club’s managing director for business, said October “isn’t simply about one Ospreys fixture”, with schools, colleges, the university and Swansea RFC all using the ground.
Swansea Council is putting £7.6m into the ground and the Ospreys £2.6m, on a 50-year lease.
In return the council takes the freehold of the clubhouse and changing rooms on Bryn Road, folded into the Ospreys’ lease, and says its money secures community use for around 90 per cent of available hours outside major fixtures. Sport has been played on the site since 1876; cricket, there for a century and a half, moved to Sketty Lane after last season.
The Ospreys are building a home while their future is decided by someone else. The Welsh Rugby Union has guaranteed Cardiff and the Dragons two of three licences from 2028/29, leaving the Ospreys and the Scarlets to fight for the one left in the west.
Dave Reddin insisted on Friday that the cut is going ahead, calling it “the brutal economics of it all”. Swansea Council has resumed its High Court challenge against the union, and the process that decides who survives starts in December.
Related stories from Swansea Bay News
ST HELEN’S: Rugby is back at the old ground on 7 October, and Gower College get first go at the new pitch
The full October schedule and how tickets are being released.ST HELEN’S: Terrace will have no roof when the Ospreys move in next month
The roof pushed to a later phase, and what supporters were told in July.OSPREYS: St Helen’s south stand to carry JCP Solicitors name for five years
The stand going up on the seafront side, and the deal behind its name.ST HELEN’S: New seafront stand, fan zone and near-7,000 capacity
What the council said the £7.6m rebuild would deliver.More on St Helen’s
#Ospreys #Rugby #StHelensStadium #SwanseaCouncil #SwanseaRFC
Every story on the rebuild of the Swansea ground. -
Empty Chinese restaurant that’s blighted Swansea street for years to be transformed https://www.diningandcooking.com/restaurants/30508/ #ChineseRestaurant #ChineseRestaurants #Restaurants #Swansea #SwanseaCouncil
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Empty Chinese restaurant that’s blighted Swansea street for years to be transformed https://www.diningandcooking.com/restaurants/30508/ #ChineseRestaurant #ChineseRestaurants #Restaurants #Swansea #SwanseaCouncil
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Empty Chinese restaurant that’s blighted Swansea street for years to be transformed https://www.diningandcooking.com/restaurants/30508/ #ChineseRestaurant #ChineseRestaurants #Restaurants #Swansea #SwanseaCouncil
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SWANSEA: St David’s car park all but gone as diggers chew through the last of the decks
The St David’s car park is almost gone.
Photographs taken from above the site on Monday morning show the multi-storey reduced to a field of crushed concrete and brick, with at least four excavators working across it.
The last of the structure is at the St David’s Place end, where a long-reach demolition machine was tearing into what remains of the decks.
A painted “lock it” car-security sign was still on an inside wall as the jaws worked alongside it.
A long-reach machine tears into the last of the decks at the St David’s Place end (Image: Swansea Bay News)When the signs came down at the start of the month, crews were still stripping the building floor by floor.
Now the rest of the site is flat. Crushed concrete covers the ground where the upper decks stood, and steel reinforcing bar pulled from it is piling up in skips.
Steel reinforcing bar in the rubble as a Cardiff Demolition machine works the site (Image: Swansea Bay News)Hoardings around the site carry the names of Cardiff Demolition Co Ltd and Andrew Scott Ltd, the firm that completed the Copr Bay North car park next door after its original contractor went into administration.
Oystermouth Road drivers can now see across the site to St David’s Church
For four decades, drivers heading into the city centre along Oystermouth Road were met by a red-brick wall of parking decks.
Now there is open ground behind the hoardings, with St David’s Church and the flats beyond it in full view from the road.
The view across the cleared site from Oystermouth Road towards St David’s Church (Image: Swansea Bay News)The car park closed for good on 13 July, the same morning Copr Bay North opened its 628 spaces next door, with St David’s season ticket holders moved across.
Its signs, including the little bishop in a mitre who welcomed drivers into town, were taken down before demolition began and handed to Swansea Museum for safekeeping, the council says.
What Porth Copr will bring to the St David’s site
The cleared ground becomes part of Porth Copr, the council’s regeneration scheme with Urban Splash. The council says it will bring new office, learning and commercial space to the city centre, with new public spaces around St David’s Church.
Council leader Cllr Rob Stewart called the demolition “another visible sign of progress” when work began.
“This is a significant site in the heart of Swansea and its transformation will help support investment, jobs and city centre activity for years to come,” he said.
Swansea Arena and Meridian Tower beyond the hoardings as machines work behind them (Image: Swansea Bay News)In July he promised further announcements “in the coming weeks” about plans for the former St David’s Shopping Centre site.
No start date has been announced for the main build. Surveys and ground investigations have been carried out ahead of it, the council says.
The car park outlived most of the St David’s Shopping Centre it was built to serve by five years, and the Llys Dewi Sant flats next door by four.
One of the last surviving pieces of the old shopping centre still stands beside the site. High on its red-brick wall is the same little bishop in a mitre, with “St David” in white letters beside him.
The St David bishop sign on one of the last surviving parts of the former St David’s Shopping Centre, beside the car park site (Image: Swansea Bay News)The bishop who greeted drivers from the car park is safe in Swansea Museum. His twin is still up on the wall next door, looking over the rubble.
Related stories from Swansea Bay News
SWANSEA: The car park is coming down, but the saint who welcomed you into town is saved for the museum
How the bishop signs went to Swansea Museum before the diggers moved in.COPR BAY: Opening day named for long-delayed car park, and a city centre car park closing the same day
The July announcement that sealed St David’s fate.Porth Copr
#CoprBay #demolition #PorthCopr #StDavidSCarPark #SwanseaCityCentre #SwanseaCouncil
Every story on the plans for the former St David’s site.