Newtown

Newtown is called Newtown because it was one, laid out below an existing settlement at Llanfair-yng-Nghedewain in the late thirteenth century. The name has been accurate for seven hundred years, which is longer than most.

For most of that time it was a small market town on the Severn, and nothing much distinguished it from Llanidloes upstream or Welshpool down.

Flannel

Then wool. Welsh flannel was made across mid Wales on hand looms in farmhouses, and in the late eighteenth century Newtown became the place it was collected, finished and sold. By the 1830s the town had multi-storey weaving lofts, a flannel exchange, and a workforce that had come off the land into terraces built to house it.

Look up in the older streets and the evidence is obvious: long ranges of windows on the top floors of otherwise ordinary buildings, put there to light hand looms. The Textile Museum occupies one of them.

The trade did not survive the transfer of woollen manufacture to Yorkshire, where steam and coal were cheaper and closer. By the later nineteenth century Newtown's mills were closing.

Robert Owen

Robert Owen was born here in 1771, the son of a saddler, and left at ten. What he did afterwards — New Lanark, the eight-hour day, infant schools, the co-operative movement, a serious attempt to build an alternative to industrial capitalism — happened in Scotland, Manchester and Indiana.

He came back at the end, died in Newtown in 1858 and is buried at the old St Mary's church by the river. There is a museum in the town and a statue outside it.

The awkward part, which the museum handles honestly, is that Newtown's own workers had a rough nineteenth century while its most famous son was arguing for better ones elsewhere. Chartism was strong here, as it was upstream at Llanidloes, and for the same reasons.

Mail order

In 1861 a draper's apprentice named Pryce Pryce-Jones started sending flannel to customers by post, using the railway that had just reached the town and the parcel service that came with it. Customers ordered from a catalogue and the goods arrived at their nearest station.

This is generally described as the world's first mail order business.

It worked well enough that Queen Victoria was a customer and that he built the Royal Welsh Warehouse, a large red-brick block beside the station, in 1879. It is still the most conspicuous building in the town.

Doubling the town

The last major thing to happen to Newtown was government policy. Mid Wales had been depopulating for a century, and from the late 1960s the Mid Wales Development Corporation set out to reverse it in one place. Newtown was chosen. New industrial estates, new housing, and a target of roughly doubling the population.

It largely worked, in the sense that the population did roughly double and the town is now the largest in Powys. Whether it worked in other senses is a live local argument. The estates built in the 1970s look like estates built in the 1970s, and the older centre and the newer edges do not obviously belong to the same place.

What is there now

The textile buildings, once you know to look up. The Robert Owen Museum. The Royal Welsh Warehouse. Oriel Davies, a public gallery with a better exhibition programme than a town this size would normally support. The old St Mary's church, roofless beside the river, abandoned after flooding and replaced in 1847.

And the Severn, which floods, and which the town has spent two centuries arranging itself around.