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Literary Passion · Swansea, Swansea

5 Cwmdonkin Drive (Dylan Thomas's birthplace)

The steep Uplands semi where Dylan Thomas wrote two-thirds of his poems in a bedroom the size of a confession box — the sensuous, rolling voice of 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower' formed here before London, Caitlin and the Boathouse. Pair with Laugharne for the marriage.

StatusDocumented history
Dateborn here 27 October 1914; wrote here to 1934
The peopleDylan Thomas, Caitlin Macnamara (met 1936)
The site5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Uplands
Coordinates51.62100, -3.96480 (confidence 5/5)

The story

Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October 1914 in the front bedroom of this modest Edwardian semi in Uplands, Swansea, and lived here for his first twenty-three years. In a tiny back bedroom, at a desk overlooking Swansea Bay, the teenage Thomas filled his notebooks and wrote roughly two-thirds of all the poetry he would ever publish before he was twenty, teaching himself the tradition from his schoolmaster father's downstairs library. Left to rot as a student bedsit, the house was rescued and restored to its 1914 condition by Geoff Haden and opened to visitors in 2008 — you can tour it, and even stay the night in the room where the poems came.

More stories at this spot

"Do not go gentle"

Thomas wrote one of the most famous poems in English, addressed to his dying father — the fierce old schoolmaster of the Cwmdonkin Drive study, going blind and quiet. Its roaring refusal of death was a son's argument with the man who had taught him to read. D. J. Thomas died in December 1952; his son survived him by less than a year.

Sources

Nearby on the map

Literary PassionDylan Thomas Boathouse, LaugharneLaugharne, Carmarthenshire · Wales

The cliff-side home of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, whose passionate, tempestuous, hard-drinking marriage was as famous as his verse; the writing shed overlooking the estuary is preserved as if he had just stepped out.

Documented historyFolk Rite & FertilityCaru yn y Gwely — Bundling & the Love SpoonSt Fagans, Cardiff (museum); custom pan-North-Wales, Denbighshire/Gwynedd (custom); Cardiff (collection) · Wales

Courting couples were sent to bed together — clothed, a bolster between them — while the suitor whittled a spoon to prove he was husband material.

Documented historyScandal & SocietyTiger Bay (Cardiff's dockland demi-monde)Cardiff, Cardiff · Wales

Cardiff's legendary dockland — one of Britain's first truly multicultural quarters, notorious in its coal-boom heyday for sailors' taverns, dance halls and commercial affection, and beloved by those who lived there as a warm, tight community the papers never bothered to understand. Shirley Bassey is its most famous daughter.

Documented historyHot spot

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