‘People have said they’ve seen lights on at two in the morning.’
Tucked away among green fields, it could easily be mistaken at first glance for a charming little hamlet of white-fronted houses with red and grey-tiled roofs. There are a couple of streets and even a building that could pass for a small school or community hall.
But upon closer inspection, there’s something slightly eerie about the scene. No matter how long you look, you won’t spot a single soul. No lights will flicker on in the windows as darkness falls, and the only sounds you’ll hear are the wind and the steady patter of rain, both common in this area.
There are no tarmacked roads leading to or from this ghostly settlement. With its unsettling stillness, it feels less like a village and more like a film set deserted halfway through a shoot.
Despite being constructed just over a decade ago and receiving a visit from King Charles when he was Prince of Wales, it has never been home to anyone. Yet there was a time when it “looked incredible”, recalls digital storyteller and former broadcaster Jay Curtis, complete with “fresh paint, green grass, one of the houses fully decorated as a show home”, reports the Express. Clearly, a significant amount of time, effort and money had been invested. So what went wrong?
The houses were erected on the site of a former BP crude oil refinery in Llandarcy, on the outskirts of Neath in south Wales in 2013. Built from traditional Welsh stone using state-of-the-art construction methods, they were intended to serve as a model for an eco-friendly village comprising thousands of new homes, and even had the backing of then-Prince Charles.
In fact, the development drew inspiration from his Poundbury project in Dorset, with the Prince saying he was “trying to break the commercial mould with the kind of challenges the world is now facing”. Yet 13 years on from construction, the homes sit vacant with no infrastructure in place.
The initial plan envisaged these empty properties forming part of a 25-year regeneration scheme – a £1.2bn environmentally-sustainable urban village comprising 4,000 homes, 10,000 residents and four schools. In certain respects, that ambition paid off.
Not far from the deserted village, the orderly streets of the new Coed Darcy housing estate now occupy what was once the sprawling, contaminated remains of the UK’s first crude oil plant, which shut down in 1997. Following years of intensive land remediation — removing contamination, chemicals and hazards left from decades of refining — building work commenced.
Whilst approximately 250 homes were constructed at Coed Darcy and are now occupied, planned roads connecting the development to nearby Neath and even Swansea were started but never completed. The empty hamlet was built as a showpiece, a pilot village designed to demonstrate what could be accomplished on the former refinery site. These initial homes were erected before surrounding infrastructure and were meant to be integrated into the broader development as it grew. But that growth never materialised.
The hamlet lies just off the M4 motorway, where thousands of drivers pass by each day, mostly oblivious to what exists beyond the verge. There are no pavements leading into it, no obvious access routes, yet residents have spotted signs of activity. Making the site habitable and fit for purpose has been a lengthy undertaking. Developer St Modwen stripped out 125 kilometres of pipes and cables from the former refinery, and extracted 1.25 million litres of oil from the lakes and ponds scattered across the area.
Since work began, however, wildlife, trees and vegetation have made a comeback as contamination levels have gradually fallen.
Speaking to WalesOnline in 2019, Tom Gough from St Modwen explained the empty properties: “The buildings were constructed to test design and building techniques and used to showcase new ways of constructing homes. They were built much earlier than you would usually do as test homes and they are sat there ready to be occupied. What isn’t in place is the infrastructure like roads, which would usually be in place first.”
When asked if they would ever be occupied, he said: “Our intention is that the dwellings will eventually be utilised as part of the wider scheme.”
Yet locals have long questioned what’s going on at the site, with some convinced the land still harbours oil deposits.
“The water around there is just gross and you can see there is still a fair amount of oil being rejected by the ground,” Seren Craven, a frequent visitor to the woods near Coed Darcy, told WalesOnline in 2019.
“I think it’s going to be a fair amount of time before they consider letting them be lived in. In the summer it looks wonderful though, nice and peaceful.”
Over time, the houses have started to decay under nature’s influence. Plaster crumbles from walls.
Grass has become patchy and brown. Once decorative lakes now lie barren.
Jay, who visited more recently and took the haunting, eerie photos, suspects that lingering contamination might still be an issue.
“People have said they’ve seen lights on at two in the morning,” Jay revealed to WalesOnline recently.
“Vehicles coming and going at odd times. Something’s happening there – no one’s quite sure what. To have that level of hype, a Royal visit, and such ambition – and then to see it all just left – it astounds people. These are big, expensive homes. There are a lot of them. And no-one ever moved in.”
