If there’s anything you can say about Wales and the Welsh economy over the last 20-30 years it’s that we love an artist’s impression.
We can’t get enough of them. They’re usually accompanied by carefully prepared spiel about how the artist’s impression promises to create X hundred or thousand jobs and put (insert town/city/county name here) on the map.
There have been at least three in Bridgend alone I can think of – a proposed redevelopment of the Rhiw Centre in the early 2000s, the Island Farm Sports Village and the Ineos factory.
The beauty of it is that nothing has to get built. The artist’s impression is in itself hailed as a sign of progress. The main drawback of “never making it off the drawing board” is that continued failures engender a sense of cynicism and even outright hostility towards any new project no matter how small.
That’s not to say that failing to transition from an artist’s impression to reality is always a bad thing. In some cases, it’s a sign that the powers that be aren’t so easily taken in by PR or promises of jam tomorrow for the sake of a flashy image or promise – usually involving people riding bikes, buying coffee or, more recently, using ziplines. Cars and traffic jams don’t exist in the world of artist impressions and the high-end handbag shop on the ground floor of the new tower block almost always ends up being a Tesco Express.
What follows is a selection of some of my favourites down the years – though that shouldn’t be interpreted as an endorsement of any of them. Does it also beg the question, “Which developments being proposed now will suffer the indignity of being added to this list in the future?”
Often said to be a spiritual successor to Legend Court, a few miles down the road at a former opencast mine at Llanilid, Rhondda Cynon Taf, a similar proposal was put forward as Dragon International Studios (more commonly known as “Valleywood”).
With the backing of British film royalty, Richard Attenborough, the original vision would’ve seen the 300+acre site developed in multiple stages, with sound stages being the first phase and later phases including housing, hotels, conference facilities, at least one business park, a film academy and a Universal Studios style theme park.
In the end, a few sound stages that wouldn’t look out of place on an industrial estate have been built on the edge of the site – and that’s absolutely fine; it’s just what film studios look like.
It just hasn’t come anywhere close to the original vision and the majority of the Llanilid site is now earmarked for housing.
