Steelworks at Sandy

Steel Works at Sandy

Steel making commenced, at what is now known as Sandy Water Park, in 1897, when The Llanelly Steel Company built their works on land reclaimed from the sea. It continued until 1907 when they became The Llanelly Steel Company Limited.

In 1951 The Iron and Steel Corporation of Great Britain ran the site.

Duport Limited took over in 1960 and sadly closed in 1981 when Duport went bankrupt and made many people unemployed.

The land where Duport and The Llanelli Steel Works once stood was acquired in 1986 and developed into a water park by Llanelli Borough Council and the Welsh Development Agency.

A memorial to the steel workers stands on a hill overlooking Sandy Lake and the estuary.

The top image shows what the area, today known as Sandy Water Park, looked like when it was still very much an industrial area.

The aerial image below and left shows the start of the regeneration of the area after the closure and removal of Duport steelworks.

You will notice that the houses are not yet present in the image, nor the Mabinogion Wood.

This memorial to the male and female steel workers of the former steelworks that once covered Sandy Water Park, stands upon a mound overlooking the lake on one side and the estuary on the other and is one of the highest locations in the park.

The memorial represents a stack of iron ingots, as they would have been cast in the steelworks of the time

Left: An image of Duport Steel works in the distance, with Sandy Road houses just in front and Stradey Park rugby ground and Llanelli Cricket Club taking the centre of this image.

We imagine this picture to be around 1960s/1970s.

Below: A much older and more striking image of the Steelworks - a totally different landscape to the present day.

A Llanelli Star report about the pending closure of Duport Steel.

'Leaving a Gap in Community'

The Star reported on Saturday, March 21, 1981, that Llanelli and steel-making had gone their separate ways: "The ingot was fired and one of Sospan's basic foundations melted away."

The paper led its coverage with the symbolic gesture of eight-year-old Denver Wilson, and other steelworkers' children, who marched on 10 Downing Street with a hammer and miniature coffin, to ask the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher to put the final nail in the plant's coffin. But the workers did not give up hope and fought to find a buyer to preserve the works.

Denzil Davies, MP for Llanelli at the time, said: "The whole community is going to go down the drain unless we stand up and fight."

The wives of redundant Duport steel men formed their own action group, led by Carole Edwards, who tried to rekindle the interest of potential buyers.

But after six months of determined campaigning, the group reluctantly threw in the towel and disbanded.

The whole of the site was bought by the Borough Council by 1986 and demolition was swiftly carried out.

The land went on to be transformed and where huge chimneys once rose skywards, now sits the tranquil Sandy Water Park, a housing development and The Sandpiper restaurant.