Sand barrier

Description

Levelling of the sand dunes prior to the building of the Sandfields Estate, c.1950. In the background Mynydd Dinas and the heavy equipment hired to complete the task. In October, 1947, Port Talbot Corporation began negotiations for the purchase of 250 acres of land on Aberavon Burrows for housing and associated development. The land in question lay between the Rhondda and Swansea Bay Railway and the foreshore with a need for immediate access to the site to provide some 250 aluminium homes (prefabs) for workers for the expanding Margam steel works. To facilitate this need the area, dominated by dunes some 80 feet high, had to be levelled and 2 million tonnes of sand removed. An early, major problem, was onshore winds depositing sand and impeding construction. By the summer of 1951, prefabs, Cornish and ﾓno fine'sﾔ Wimpey houses, the latter constructed by pouring concrete into moulds on site, were providing homes for the influx of workers required to man the Abbey Works, the largest integrated steel works