UK housing experiment leaves a Ghost Town on a mountain! 

Went there about 30 years ago. All I can remember are gangs of feral children in shell suits and a Mad Max vibe.

i worked there --- during the early 90 s doing refurbs. the security guard said " mate , you can t park your van outside the compound it will get robbed" i said " son i m from merthyr tydfil " ---- went down the shops up to a gang of local youths and said " see that van there , every week that does not get touched i shall give you £20 " BEST security guards ever !

I lived here as a new born baby in the mid 80's as my parents were young and skint. My old man told me that because of the rediculous crime rate at the time he used to push his motorcycle up the stairs every night to our three story flat to keep it safe on the balcony... That was until it was slolen from the outside!

Is it weird that I really want to live there? It's like living at the end of the world or a post apocalypse or something, it's a total vibe. I dig it.

In the 1960’s when this “good idea” was built the government and their councils actually spent money on the people with a no expense spared approach to the point that they actually built entire new towns, hospitals, schools, leisure centres,shops,churches and all the things laughed at in this video all around the country and places like this were a lovely place for the working man to live. What destroyed this place was it being sold off years ago and put to private hands where profit and cost cutting are the main concern, all around (and I live in England and I’m successful ) I’m seeing everywhere the relics of these “council days” being hurriedly demolished and replaced with private pay through the nose modern equivalents and everybody’s oblivious to what we had in the past. This place was actually so lovely back in the 70’s, from Cardiff we visited my mums cousin there many times and it was lovely, we were a little envious of how nice it was but like anything that’s not invested in soon goes down hill, what could be nicer than a modern small estate at the top of a mountain? Great views and a small community all living decent working class lives, it was a “good idea”. Coal was replaced in the valleys sure but today like everywhere leisure, food and hospitality are the main employment around the country,other parts of Wales and the uk also have lost their industry but employment is abundant in those modern things. Made me very sad seeing this as I remember it lovely just the powers that be mishandled things from the top replacing investing large scale in the people to now just leaving the likes of housing associations, private short term renting, private care homes, rent paid for your room and a bus pass, and crime should be neutralised by the police? More busses subsidised by the council if they cared and spent the money could’ve got those people down that hill to those jobs and the grey houses could’ve been painted, the welsh do need to stop fly tipping as many a picturesque natural place is littered I’ve seen worse than anywhere. They closed the old people homes, mental hospitals,privatised everything, almost totally stopped spending on the nation, even took the milk off the schoolchildren, its the health service next?! Everybody’s forgotten what the people used to be entitled to and what was the norm....Thats what really happened to Penrys 😐👍

I went here in 1983, so that was 40 years ago. I don’t remember it looking so run down at that time, and the house that I went In was ok. The thing actually that stands out about this part of wales is how nice the people were, but the kids all seemed to get into trouble with the police and many of them would take extended holidays in Portland in what was a Borstal at the time. But again the thing is my memory is that the people were actually decent, just that they had very little opportunity and the kids were bored and got in trouble.

I’ve delivered parcels here a number of times and I can 100% agree with this video. I hated going here and always wondered “who the fuck built this shit hole up here”.

I actually lived here for over 16 years and loved living here. My brother still lives here, the views from his room window are amazing. The houses are lovely and spacious inside and the people living are lovely too. I love going back up there to visit, I have so many happy memories of Penrhys

I watched a Tv programme about a village called Perthcelyn that was also built on a hill in the same area as Penrys. Feel sad for those who have to live in these bleak places.These Turdtown videos are very interesting. Thankyou

If this place wasn't so isolated and hilly and if the houses were in better condition I think it could work, I quite like the angular design of the houses and their positioning is spacious; this has potential and more appealing than a tight terraced street with nowhere to walk or park.

It was the right thing to do at the time, but they needed infrastructure. There’s similar estates built in Slovakia in the 1960s but they had railway tram services stopping at the villages and mainline connections. They should have got Soviet’s in the 1960s to do the planning

This place has many things in common with Skelmersdale in Lancashire. Town planning _(together with charted accountancy)_ should be considered an imprisonable crime.

Honestly I can't believe it,, surely there's bleeding millions of people, who would jump at the chance to be away from uncivilized xxxx" give this town ,village ""to people who want to live in peace

If this wouldn't be this far away from everything and the condition of the houses weren't this bad, I actually could imagine living there. "Away from all people" - What a wonderful phrase, isn't it? :X

I had to deliver up there in the early 90’s. Air gun pellets used to pepper the van as I drove out.

To add to the original residents misery the houses were very badly built and suffered from leaks and damp...Apparently the original architect based the house design on an Italian mountain village!!

I grew up in the Rhondda and Penrhys had a poor reputation. So many folk were plonked there and if you haven't got a car - you really could feel stranded - it is an eye sore. I know many who live there now have done much to try to improve it and it's reputation has improved. He is right though about 60s planners, architecture - dreadful!

So many poorly designed houses in the UK. How any of these plans got approved by councils is just shocking...Cold damp houses...How an architect can walk away with pride knowing that this was his or her work.

There was a similar looking estate just outside Oldham called Sholver. It was built to re house people from old slum terraced houses that were way past their best. Within a month of people moving in all the doors had been burnt and the baths were full of coal !! My Dad worked there as an electrician for the local council as an apprentice. Some of the tales he told of that place were unreal

Back in the 80s, I was doing a recce for a gig at the Star in Pentre and decided to find out whether Penrhys was as bad as its reputation. Seeing malevolent expressions on the face of the kids, I rapidly changed my mind and put my foot down til I reached a paved area and the crunching noise of broken glass. I didn't want to get stuck up there with a flat, so slapped on some right lock and the van arse-ended on the rubble in a handbrake(-less) turn. As I GTFO, the kids were picking up bricks, so was glad to see them fast receding in the mirrors. The gig at the bottom of the hill was a little like the Country Bar in the Blues Brothers film.

Those houses are soooo Scottish looking. I used to live in a town in Scotland full of those kind of houses

What a shame. I actually like the odd looks of the houses, makes a difference from all the clones you get on most UK estates. Surely they could fix the place up?

back in the 90s i remember installing alarms up there jesus it was bleak and some young kids nearly stole my ladders ....

Good description. One of those large buildings had a boiler that was powered by coal from the mines nearby.

Looking forward to this. Penrhys is right up the hill from where I live. Can't wait to hear your perspective on it.

Born and raised on Penrhys ...Loved the place!

This area looks to me as though it has potential. The planting of trees and large shrubs could have helped if sited with care, a coat of paint and a good clear up. A site could have been designated to leave rubbish to be collected. Lastly, some estate staff to be on call for residents when needed. Where there's a will there's a way! XXX

I have heard that there has been a planning application for a new school, also the site is going to be sold to a developer, no doubt new houses will be sold which no locals can afford, the building with the blue roof was part of original boiler house, the boiler house has been demolished, also the pipe used to supply the houses used to freeze, so no heat 😂😂😂

Seems like somewhere I might be able to afford to buy a house

This is very sad to see. It feels very depressing.

To add to this, a murder was committed here some years ago. The residents were either too scared or too tight knit to co-operate with the police investigation. The murdered person, apparently, had broken too many of the cultural norms that abound. Read "Cider With Rosie" , noting a similar incident in rural Gloucestershire.

Would probably have been quite nice if all owner-occupied

They should hold an art event here where people get to paint houses, murals, get involved with DIY community stuff such as gardens/allotments, play area/nature areas, skatepark for those inclined, a youth club etc. Community builds places up !

what a location though a lovely forestry behind the site with such lovely walks access to both valleys a beautifull golf course and sunshine all day in the summer with no major roads running through here i would imagine all new houses to be built there in the future id love one

I WAS BORN THERE IN 72 AND LIVED THERE FOR TEN YEARS.HAPPY DAYS INDEED .THAT WAS JUST BEFORE THE PLACE STARTED TO CRUMBLE ...SPENT LOTS OF TIME BEING A KID IN THE FOREST ON TOP.G..REAT DAYS....YES THERE WAS THE INFAMOUS OLD BOILER HOUSE ON THE TOP ROAD THAT WAS ALWAYS BREAKING DOWN AND HAD LOTS OF POWER CUTS DUE TO THE EXPOSURE TO WIND AND RAIN UP THERE.

Architects and Town Planners- geniuses all.

Your videos provide more insight into the uk’s social, economic and cultural dysfunctions than a thousand academic papers or a legion of patronising speeches about ‘levelling up’.

Go there in the depths of winter. Looks like something from the ussr. It's fantastic.

In 1989 We got taken here on a geography field trip to conduct interviews with locals - needless to say it didn't go well...

the blue bombshell up the top, in the late 80's was a training centre, i took a course there in computer science for a year, hated the place.

Given a lot of people work from home now I can see this place making a come back. Scenery looks lovely.

The Full Log delivered. Glad you went back for an extra squeeze 😁

Nice video as I actually know of Penrhys and have driven past it on many occasions. One interesting, if not a morbid fact about the area is, that in 1962, after a smallpox outbreak when the local hospital was used as a main site for treatment of it, rather than clean and fumigate the hospital, it was burnt down, being fed with a constant petrol supply to keep the fire going. Were you to come off the island, go down Penrhys Rd then turn first left, it would have been to your left before you got to the golf club. Its footprint can still be made out in the field there, if you know where to look.

Reminds me of the village of Hallglen in Falkirk. The brutalist, angled buildings are very similar to what was done there. It is also high up and has had a reputation for being a bit of a craphole. Then again, that could be said for a lot of Falkirk 😆

The concept wasn't terrible, it was just the execution of it. The 60's were a time of concrete housebuilding. Most of that housing has now been removed right across our islands. We've demolished a number of huge estates as 'failed' but the issue still remains: people need homes. We now have more 'people' than we ever did before. All the land formerly designated for housing needs to be used for housing (along with appropriate infrastructure) and the land designated for farming needs to be used to produce food. That shouldn't be rocket science.

I live in the south of England. The issue of problem families all being dumped in one estate happened here as well. The local council had taken it over and they thought it was a great idea. Before that it had been used to rehouse families for inner London as part of a plan to improve people living standards and it it was a good place to live. The place became a good place to get your drugs amongst other things such a place to dump your old cars. In the end the council had to pull the whole estate down and at the same time they erased its name from history! So much for council social engineering.

I delivered a bed here for work in the 90's. It was the last drop of an awful winter's day and just getting dark. I delivered across the UK including deprived areas of cities like London and Birmingham and I never felt unsafe until I went to Penrhys. It felt like one of those places you would just disappear if you looked at someone the wrong way and the other lad with me wouldn't get out of the truck so I had to do the delivery on my own. The amount of people out and about was unnerving considering the weather up there that day.

Thanks for preparing the video. Speaking as spatial planner the design of the settlement (2:26) is pretty good - the dwellings face the right orientation for solar gain, there is what looks like a district heating system (maybe that is the hospital building referred to), there is alot of space around the buildings for recreation and minimal shadow paths to neighbouring properties. There is what looks like most of the facilities needed for the scale of the settlement. Including allotment gardens. And the designs of the dwellings themselves whilst possibly could be viewed as dull are not especially offensive either. The geographical location is one of isolation and there fore compromised and we don't know the exact rationalle for siting here and this is ultimately the downfall given poor access to non-daily shops, services, social contact, jobs and further education. The main thing that you have to understand is that new towns are notoriously difficult to plan for because of their unnatural non-organic origins and Penrhys is clearly not self-supporting. To add to the backdrop of this is not the failure of planning but the influence of global economics in the 1970s onwards which has been further exacerbated by neo-liberal politics through the last four decades. Once the mines closed there is little prospect for this type of settlement unless there were some economic development (jobs) nearby or transport initiatives in order to cater for low car ownership to access them.

Maybe you can make a Turdtown on Jaywick in Essex along with Clacton-on-Sea and other towns in Essex, Jaywick is the most deprived area in the UK and has an interesting back history to explore.

My ex girlfriend grew up in the village at the bottom of the valley, Pontygwaith. She once took me on a little tour of Penrhys, it really is bizarre. I’ve never seen such a depressing place in my life. I just feel so bad for the people who live there. It’s fascinating though so if you’re ever nearby it’s a must see!

The house designs look depressingly familiar - every way you described it sounds a lot like parts of Newton Aycliffe in Co Durham. The main difference being they decided not on Grey for the outside, but black brickwork....which looks surprsingly similar in terms of the emotional impact it has.

Thanks for advertising it , SERCO will find some tenants for this housing estate . I expect they did not realise it was there .

To my eyes the location looks stunning, so I’d say it’s more the people than the location that was at fault. Then again I was raised in Aberdeen which is a very hilly city, being built over the peaks and valley of 7 hills before becoming flat as a pancake along the coastal edge.

Penrhys is an extreme case,but there are similar looking estates all over the UK.There is one in Barry,also on a hillside but not nearly as high.I think 60s architects meant well but some of the social housing they designed have been outlasted by the old terraced houses they were meant to replace.

Did a lot of landscaping in areas like this, all over the Welsh valleys, i remember planting 30 odd mature trees in a park, as we put them in kids came behind us and ring barked them all. Bricks hurled at us as we built sports pitches and so on. Charming

Always welcome to visit the Medway towns in Kent

Fascinating vid, I want to go and see this place

I have lived in this place you call a ghost town all my life and I absolutely love it there may not be many things to do but it’s a community that stands together when times are hard, whoever have given this information is lies nobody burns peoples homes down maybe back when it was first built that’s what happened but it no longer like that people shouldn’t throw bricks at glass houses the people who live in Penrhys maybe forgot but when something is wrong we stick together. This video is just slandering the estate as a bad place to live it’s not it’s a good place to live, the people who live here like the estate and nobody should comment on that unless your willing to comment on other places because no matter where you go there will always be good and bad things about a place

My old man worked in construction in Penrhys when it was being built. He said it was so high up that when driving up there in the winter you would drive through clouds.

The pitched roofs look cool to me. I don't think the architecture is/was really the problem, the infrastructure is.

As the sign used too say "Welcome to sunny penrhys-Watch your wheels". The road round is a great proving ground for any car mods you might make, it's like Wales own Nurburgring but a bit shitter!

I think it has potential for renewable energy. The roof design looks ideal for solar and the mountain is ideal for wind. It could be free energy with a little investment

You gotta do West of the Lake District! Beautiful countryside encrusted with bleak, deteriorating settlements. That stretch of coast is in stark contrast to the picturesque scenes that can be found just a few miles away. Really love these vids! These places need plubicity to remind everyone about the unacceptably substandard conditions that linger around the UK and how the nation still needs to figure out how to deal with boom towns and villages that fall into decay.

Very interesting story. Never heard of this place. The 4th most deprived town in Wales. God help the other 3 above them on the list!

Penrhys Estate was built and opened in 1966. I lived here from 66 to 72 and these houses were spacious and the comunity are very close. We had the comunity centre the pub and a spar in the 60s. We did have a lot of black pats due to heating coming then from the boiler house through coal.

If ever you cover Essex…. Jaywick… You’ll absolutely love it x

As youngster back in the 80's we was always warned to stay away from Penrhys, when i got my first car i took a drive up to see it and understood why we was all warned to stay away from the place. From this video you can not grasp how rough this place really was, even the police wouldn't go up their at night unless they where in a convoy of riot vans because they would always be attacked by local gangs of teenagers. The local feral kids would start a house fire in the hope a fire engine would turn up just so they had something to throw bricks at, back then it was how they entertained themselves.

I had to do some debt collecting in that area during the 90s. A bloody terrifying place at night. What made it worse is that you could never find the house you were after. He's not joking about the random doors etc.

"From Bauhaus to Our House," is a great book not about Penrhys, but about why crap like Penrhys exists.

Looking at a global scale this still a grande place to be, no belligerent government, completely off grid and quite some space; educate all with watching the 11 series of Walking the Dead, and you can create Heaven on Earth. Small note; I am Daryl! Great upload!

An interesting town with mad looking estates is Skelmersdale which was built to house thousands of liverpools scousers who lived in slum housing. The estates look like some of the worst you will see in Europe

We have “award winning” architects in Margate too. They put up a couple of tin sheds and called it an art gallery. They look exactly the same as the houses in wales shown in your clip with the sloping “toilet shed” roof of the 1930s. Ugly, cheap looking, cheaply built and expensive to maintain, along with socially divisive. The poor are always discriminated against.

The roads look 1000 times better than anywhere else in the UK, to be honest mate. No potholes or gigantic pot canyon's which take out suspension and buckle wheels like most A roads in England.

I wild camped in october on that hill above Rhondda. It was flooded and the vango tent ended up in a lake. Theres a shortage of housing for many and refugees would be good occupants like Afghans who are often strict muslims and want to work and they are not into using drugs generally. I would live there if it is safe and secure. You dont want kiddie fiddlers and thieves around. The church being there open is very positive and a great inspiration for Rhondda.

I live a little further up the valley in Pentre but me and my boyfriend sometimes go to Mary's well for walks I've taken some mad liminal space pictures up at the town, you summed it up perfectly. Everyone says 'don't park up penyrys they'll nick your car doors' 😂😂

Never would have expected markyd123 to be making content like this, but I’m all for it, good job man keep it up!

I remember going there in 1977 looking to buy my first car (I lived in Pontypridd) - and it looked new and fresh then - better than the run down estates of, e.g. Trebanog. However, its issue was obvious even to a 17 year old me!! It was remote from the Valley’s with no community at all, and was like a wind tunnel!! Oh and the car - complete scam!! I bought a nice Morris 1300 from a colleague of my dad!! Instead ( Well ok my dad paid for it!!).

i grew up here, best place ever to growup!! it as gone bad now but there was everything you could want! he didn't say about the old centre, best place to hang about and the old fishshop! plus we would get a chinese van that would park behide the centre, and the cafe in the church! everything we ever wanted! so do some more research!!!

Need to do a vid on Bradford. Constantly gets voted UK's worst city and was recently named most dangerous city in Europe. Lived there my whole life and can't wait to move.

The large building at the top of the village is/was the boiler house for the communal heating system, I believe.

Looks similar to housing in Cumbernauld

When I was a kid, 6 years old or so, living in Llwynipia, directly below Penrhys, we used to climb over the back wall and walk straight up the mountain to Penrhys, stopping at St. Mary's Well on the way, which was at that time wide open and accessible. There were no houses there and it was beautiful up there then but by the time I was 8 and we moved to Ynyswen, there were houses. I used to go up there as my dad worked up there as a carpenter. He used to call them 'Little Boxes' and sing a bit of the song by Pete Seger to me about them. Roll on 15 years and no one wanted to go to, and as vandalism was then a thing, after centuries of being open to anyone, St. Mary's well was enclosed in Railings, a gate used to be open to allow access then, I doubt it does now though.

Think....it must be 10 times worse in the winter when there will be more frequent snow due to the elevation, and all those steep slopes will turn into ice rinks when the temperature drops below 0C. Effectively you'll be trapped until the thaw comes!

The population of the Rhondda was already falling when this place was built, Families including my grandfather's had their homes compulsory purchased to force them up the mountain. It was the first of many such villages planned by the old Rhondda borough council as a grand master plan for how people should live. Not surprisingly there was such opposition including d##h threats that these plans were quickly forgotten. Unbelievable the houses were supposedly modeled on a village in Basilicata, Southern Italy, Ironically thats where my grand mother came from! There's a bit of a difference between a southern Italian hill top village and a wet windy Welsh mountain top. The big blue building was the boiler house for the heating system you mentioned. The ducting for the pipes were a super highway for cockroaches.

By the early 80's the mines were gone and with them so the whole reason for most towns in the valleys to exist at all. Even then Penrhys was a grim shit hole. I feel desperately sorry for anyone living there now.

It looks like a place where the Uk army would practice Cold War war games!!

A few months ago I had to deliver parcels in Penrhys, it's the only time I've not gone straight through the roundabout. There were plenty of kids out playing, and some residents gathered around a running car, but I remember the further up I went the more empty and abandoned the place felt, lots of clearly abandoned cars, plenty of available parking spaces, fly tipped rubbish. I had to deliver a parcel to the smaller of the two large boarded up abandoned industrial buildings at the top, I was confused on if it was the right building, but I knocked the metal door and some lad answered the door. I'm not sure what's going on in the building, I can only hope it's been purchased for renovation.

You didn’t mention the now defunct police station which had a slogan painted on it every time they tried to cover it over. Penrhys was a place that police were scarred. The residents had nothing to do. I didn’t live far from there when growing up. A very famous and also infamous place. Can’t believe how many times I’ve driven around that place. I just wish the people who live there well and hope they are safe. Much respect.

I have lived in penrhys all my life i am 54 now and will never leave this community,i married my second cousin at the age of 17 and all the community chipped in five pound per household to pay for the wedding,it was a great day and everyone was invited a real sence of community spirit,it was nothing fancy just lots of beer in a nearby field and a spit roast where the whole community got involved,the new wife got a day to remember,and as for the state of the art heating system problem on the outskirts only took a bit of ingenuity to fix when next door moved out we would burn down the house and have a good get-together a real warm vibe with enough crack and heroine for everyone and some weed for the older generation,penrhys is a great place to live and lots of drugs to offer.

If it was cleared they could sell serviced sites for self-builders. The roads, sewage, electric, etc are already in place. Great views for people who can afford to build.

Wales - beautiful countryside, terrible depressing towns. Sums it up.

Big problems: (1) They assumed cheap energy prices forever (2) They did the exact opposite of successful public housing for working people that pays itself off (e.g. Vienna, Finland, Singapore). With energy price differences, they incentivized working people to leave and people with problems to come.

It doesn't matter if you're 'the-worst-person-in-Wales', and you're bored; there's no excuse for fly-tipping!

Plenty of empty houses, how about this place for out boat people? These homes need filling.

This is such a good example of a place that could be an amazing place to live, if local services weren't cut to the bone and the place was sold to people who actually needed them rather than some housing association. It would be so fucking easy to make half this country so much better, if only people actully gave a shit.

I used to deliver meat to Woody's shop and i never had any problems with the locals, it's a awful place though and back when I was delivering i always felt sorry for the people who had to live there.

Looks like a fantastic place to cycle and ramble in summer and an absolute nightmare to live in in winter.

Some ugly horribly designed housing, set in really beautiful countryside. The whole lot needs bulldozing and start again.

And I thought Bromsgrove was a sh#t hole! Wow, Wales you've earned it.

You need to do the worst areas in Bristol, as nice as the city is in there are some real hell holes there