The Friends of Neath Abbey Iron Company: ‘Dial H for Heritage: Neath Abbey's history explained’

Neath Abbey Ironworks, an Industrial Revolution powerhouse, changed our lives forever.

It has three scheduled monuments, with two of the best and biggest surviving eighteenth century blast furnaces. It’s world-beating engineers constructed beam engines, locomotives, Town gas plants, marine engines, iron steam and sailing ships, it is 'a cradle of iron shipbuilding' and was the first place in Wales to be lit by gas.

‘Dial H for Heritage: Neath Abbey's history explained’ was a 15-Minute Heritage Grant by the National Lottery Heritage Fund awarded to the Friends of Neath Abbey Iron Company, and ran in Neath Abbey Ironworks, a telephone kiosk in Longford housing estate, and digitally.

We digitally produced a guide to Neath Abbey so that the community locally and afar could discover the rich heritage of this area which ranges from a Cistercian monastery to the Industrial Revolution’s Ironworks, a place that changed our world. We commissioned 3-D representations of the Ironworks so that people could visualise it at its world-beating peak when it powered the Industrial Revolution.