#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. -
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