As a historian, I often find myself admiring, or at least noticing, the history of the places I race in. In marathons, for example, I have run past a surviving section of the Berlin Wall, and also past Dublin Zoo, which opened to the public, for an admission cost of a penny, in 1840. I’d far rather run a marathon where there is something to look at, and in that way I’m a running tourist.
But last weekend I ran the Swansea half-marathon, and there I was a different kind of tourist. Swansea is where my maternal family is from, and therefore I looked at the sites I ran past in a different way.
Even before the race started, there were links to my family history – the baggage area for the Swansea half was right outside my great-great-grandfather’s engraver’s shop on Caer Street. Looking at the route map before I entered, I realised that I would be passing many more places where my ancestors lived and worked. The thought of running past these places, so linked to my own history, made the race a positive one in my mind before I’d even taken a step. I was looking forward to spotting the places associated with my family, and, in the event, doing so made both the race and me go quicker (so much so that I ran a PB of 1h 37min).
After a Saturday of torrential rain, Sunday started well, with sunshine and warmth. Walking up Wind Street, I could see Swansea Castle on my right, and I thought about my great-great-grandfather Henry walking up here every day, looking at the castle ruins, on his way to open his shop. Sadly, the race start, on Oxford Street, showed that many roads in the centre of Swansea are barely recognisable from their Victorian heyday. I was penned in, with M&S on one side and Sports Direct on the other – not much family history there. Once out on the road, though, the city centre was done in minutes, and then it was back down Wind Street and right onto Oystermouth Road, which skirts Swansea Bay from the city towards the Gower. Here was where my history tour really began.
Soon after the prison, the run went past a network of Victorian terraces where, around Fleet Street and Bond Street, the “proper Welsh” side of my family, the Joneses (who else?), lived after migrating from their Welsh-speaking homes in Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire (now Ceredigion) in the late 19th century. At the top of one of these roads was the church where my great-grandparents Harriet and Seth met in the choir; Harriet had to give up her job as a local schoolteacher when they married here in 1908.
Shortly after, we passed a Thai restaurant on the right, the Bay View. Formerly a pub of the same name, it was my great-grandmother’s birthplace. Upstairs was where she was born, two years after her brother Horatio Nelson. The story goes that – aptly, considering he was a pub landlord – their father got drunk on the way to register his son’s birth, hence the odd choice of name (he was supposed to be called Guy).
Then it was out of the city proper, a crowd of largely silent runners panting their way towards my grandmother’s childhood home in West Cross and up to Mumbles. This seaside village always brings back memories of childhood holidays to visit my many relatives here, and of visits with my grandma to Verdi’s ice-cream parlour at Knab Rock. Today, only a few more distant relatives are left in the area, but as a child it seemed that virtually everyone here was a relative of some kind, with older residents speaking fondly of ancestors I had never known.
Verdi’s was the halfway mark of the route, and therefore also the turning point – we sped around the café itself and came back along the seaside promenade, then back up Newton Road towards Langland, where my Uncle Eddie used to teach me astronomy, peering through his telescope in the attic of his house high up on the hill. It was here that I used to look, hypnotised, at the lights across the bay that represented, in the words of Dylan Thomas (with whom my grandfather used to frequent the local pubs), that “ugly, lovely town, crawling, sprawling by a long and splendid curving shore”.
Last weekend, I ran back along the sea towards that ugly, lovely place, thinking about how, having spent my life moving from place to place, Swansea has become more significant to me. It is the place where generations of my family lived and worked: in that sense, it is, and will always be, home. As a historian, I ran through a place that was inhabited by my forebears, giving me a sense of belonging and making the run an emotional as well as a physical experience. My ancestors were not runners, but, as I ran the race on Sunday, they were definitely running alongside me.
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