The abandoned village with beautiful new homes where no-one has ever lived | UK | News

It is nestled among green fields and could at first glance pass for a quaint little hamlet of white-fronted homes with red and grey-tiled roofs. There’s a street or two and even something that looks like it could be a little school or community hall.

But look closer and there’s something a little unsettling about the scene. Stare as long as you like and you won’t see a single person. No lights will illuminate the windows when it gets dark and there won’t be a sound beyond the wind and steady rain that are common in these parts. 

There are no paved roads leading either to or from this ghost community. Eerily still, it feels less like a village and more like a film set abandoned mid-scene. Despite being built only a decade or so ago and visited by King Charles when he was Prince of Wales, no-one has ever lived here. But there was a time when it “looked incredible”, says digital storyteller and former broadcaster Jay Curtis, with “fresh paint, green grass, one of the houses fully decorated as a show home”. Clearly, a lot of time, work and money had gone into it. So what on Earth happened?

The houses were built on the site of a former BP crude oil refinery in Llandarcy, on the outskirts of the town of Neath in south Wales in 2013 — made from traditional Welsh stone using cutting-edge construction techniques. They were designed as a showcase for an environmentally sustainable village made up of thousands of new homes and had the backing of the then-Prince Charles.

In fact, the development was inspired by his Poundbury development in Dorset and he said he was “trying to break the commercial mould with the kind of challenges the world is now facing”. But 13 years after they were built, the homes are empty with no infrastructure connected to them.

The original vision was for the empty houses to be part of a 25-year regeneration project, a £1.2bn environmentally-sustainable urban village of 4,000 homes, 10,000 residents and four schools. In some ways, that vision succeeded. Not far from the abandoned village, the neat streets of the new Coed Darcy housing estate do indeed now stand on what had been the vast, polluted remnants of the UK’s first crude oil plant which closed in 1997. After years of intensive land remediation – stripping away contamination, chemicals and hazards left behind by decades of refining – construction began.

And while around 250 homes were built at Coed Darcy and are now lived in, roads planned to link the development to nearby Neath and even the city of Swansea were started but not finished. The empty hamlet was constructed as a showcase, a test village designed to demonstrate what could be achieved on the former refinery site. These early homes were built ahead of surrounding infrastructure and were intended to be folded into the wider development as it expanded. But the expansion never came.

The hamlet sits moments from the M4 motorway where thousands of motorists pass daily, largely unaware of what lies just beyond the roadside. There are no pavements leading in, no clear access roads, and yet locals report signs of activity.

The process of making the area safe for people to live and work in has been a long one. Developer St Modwen removed 125 kilometres of pipes and cables from the refinery site, and recovered 1.25 million litres of oil from the lakes and ponds that dot the area. But since the process started, wildlife, trees and plants have returned to the area as it has steadily become less contaminated.

Tom Gough, from St Modwen, addressed the empty homes when he spoke to WalesOnline in 2019: “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.”

Asked whether they would ever be lived in, he responded: “Our intention is that the dwellings will eventually be utilised as part of the wider scheme.”

However, local people have long questioned what is happening at the site, with some believing that the land still retains some oil.

“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 regular walker through 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 homes have begun to succumb to nature. Render peels from walls. Grass has turned patchy and brown. Once-ornamental lakes now sit empty. Jay, who visited more recently and captured the striking, eerie pictures, believes lingering contamination may still be part of the problem.

“People have said they’ve seen lights on at two in the morning,” Jay told 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 amazes people. These are big, expensive homes. There are a lot of them. And no-one ever moved in.”