News on Screen

Series

Series Name

Mining Review 19th Year

Issue

Issue No.

6

Date Released

Feb 1966

Stories in this Issue:

• 1. London - Fair Play
• 2. Glamorganshire - Challenge of Tomorrow
• 3. Northamptonshire - Steel Town

Story

Story No. within this Issue

2 / 3

Summary

NoS synopsis: Porth, in the Rhondda, is to be replanned. Cymmer Colliery is to be the focal point of the replanned community.
NCB Commentary - Cymmer Colliery, at Porth, in the Rhondda Valley.
Now worked out, the backyard of Cymmer could well become the site of a civic centre of the future.
For Porth has been selected as the site of the creation of a new centre to the Valleys’ community life - Porth, where it all began back in 1849.
At the deserted colliery an exhibition is mounted - Rhondda’s challenge of tomorrow - and civic dignitaries and national figures gather to present the blueprints to the people.
Duncan Sandys, president of the Civic Trust, sets the picture of what tomorrow will bring.
The exhibition documents a century of valley history, and signposts a new century of progress.
Here, where Cymmer Colliery still stands today, will rise the new civic centre.
The river, long hemmed in, will be revealed to play its part in this new concept of the focal point of the area.
The old, the unsightly and the worn out will be swept away.
In a magnificent natural setting, a new community will arise for tomorrows citizens of the Rhondda to grow up into with those of today.
Tomorrow’s Porth will be a town where natural beauty takes its place beside man’s constructions.
The trees planted today in the yard of Cymmer Colliery by a technique pioneered by the Coal Board, are symbols of what tomorrow will bring to this the first community in Britain to decide to carve itself a new 20th century environment out of the past.

Keywords

Buildings and structures

Locations

Wales; Porth; Rhonnda

Written sources

British Film Institute Databases
Films on Coal Catalogue   1969, p.51
Film User   Vol.20 No.231 January 1966, p41.
The National Archives COAL 32   /13 Scripts for Mining Review, 1960-1963

Credits:

Sponsor

National Coal Board

Production Co.

National Coal Board Film Unit