Fragmenting, filling and forgetting: the making of a post-industrial landscape

While post-industrial landscapes are often characterised as products of their histories, in this article, our goal is to understand and depict them as unfolding processes as much as formed places. The article focuses on an area of the South Wales coalfield, Onllwyn in the Dulais Valley, once transformed by extensive mining activities from the early nineteenth century. Employing a relational and processual approach, we explore the gradual making of a post-industrial landscape from the mid-twentieth century. We identify three key processes - fragmenting, filling, and forgetting - that have characterised this emergence from the industrial past, each of which has been shaped by intertwined socio-cultural, economic, environmental, and material factors. While these processes take distinct and localised forms, we argue that they are relevant for post-industrial landscape studies more broadly, shedding light on how such landscapes form, as on the wider dynamics of decline, renewal and change.