Where People Live Now

Powys has roughly the population it had at the start of the twentieth century. That statistic conceals almost everything interesting, because the distribution has changed completely.

The uplands emptied. The towns grew. And from the 1960s a substantial number of people moved in from England, which is now the largest single influence on how the county looks and who lives in it.

The emptying

Upland parishes lost people continuously from the 1870s until roughly the 1960s. Farm amalgamation did most of it: a holding that supported a family in 1900 is now part of a much larger business run by fewer people with more machinery.

The associated losses followed. Village schools closed as the child numbers fell below viability. Branch banks, post offices, shops, cottage hospitals, chapels, pubs and railway stations went in a sequence that is depressingly consistent across the county.

The building

Twentieth-century rural housing in Powys is dominated by two things.

Council housing. Every settlement of any size has an estate built between the 1940s and the 1970s, usually on the edge, usually in a materials palette that owes nothing to what is round it. They are frequently criticised on aesthetic grounds and they solved a genuine and severe rural housing problem, which had involved damp, overcrowding and outside sanitation well into living memory.

Bungalows. Ribbon development along roads out of villages, mostly 1960s to 1980s. They are the most common domestic building type built in rural Powys in the twentieth century and almost nobody writes about them.

Newtown got the deliberate version. From 1968 the Mid Wales Development Corporation set out to reverse depopulation by concentrating growth in one town: new industrial estates, new housing, a target of roughly doubling the population. It largely worked in the arithmetic sense and the join between the old town and the new is still obvious.

Moving in

From the 1960s, and increasingly from the 1980s, the flow reversed. People retired into Powys, moved out of the west midlands, ran businesses remotely, or came for the Centre for Alternative Technology and stayed.

That has kept the population from falling further, sustained schools and shops that would otherwise have closed, and changed the county's cultural and linguistic composition considerably. In several communities English in-migration is the single largest factor in the decline of Welsh reported between census rounds.

It has also produced the housing problem that now dominates local politics: average earnings in Powys against average house prices leaves a gap that local first-time buyers cannot bridge.

Second homes and lets

Powys has fewer second homes proportionally than Gwynedd or Pembrokeshire, but the concentrations are sharp. Hay-on-Wye, the Black Mountains villages, the Usk valley and parts of the Elan and Vyrnwy country have proportions high enough to affect school rolls and winter trade.

Welsh Government has permitted councils to charge substantial council tax premiums on second homes and long-term empty properties, and Powys applies them. Whether that has changed behaviour is argued about locally with some heat.

What this looks like on the ground

A village with a medieval church, a Victorian chapel now converted, a 1950s council estate, a run of 1970s bungalows, a barn conversion or two, and a small recent development of houses that most local people cannot afford.

That sequence is legible almost everywhere in Powys and it is a complete social history of the last hundred and fifty years standing in one street.