📍5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Uplands, Swansea SA2 0RA, UK
1914 – 1934“My parents bought 5 Cwmdonkin Drive when it was brand new in the summer of 1914, and I was born that October in the front bedroom upstairs. My mother wanted a modern house with proper plumbing for my sister Nancy and me; my father, a grammar-school English master, wanted books, and the house was full of them — he read Shakespeare to me before I could read myself. The road climbs steeply up the hill in the Uplands, and across it lay Cwmdonkin Park, my childhood kingdom: the reservoir, the bowling green, the park keeper and the lonely man on the bench who became The Hunchback in the Park. On summer evenings I could hear the other children playing there from my bed. I wrote in the tiny box bedroom, filling notebooks with poems, and more than half the poems I ever published began here. Swansea gave me my ugly, lovely town, its sea and its voices. The house has been restored to how it was in 1914 and is open to visitors.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today