This detail from the 1877 map shows how the Gough family built further houses for their workers as industry in the valley extended. You can clearly see the cottages and the garden plots which were such an important part of community life.

Other interesting features are numbered on the map.

(1) The map shows two schools in Oddfellows Street. The school on the bottom side of the street was a church school established about the middle of the 19th century. The school on the top side was a school for the children of chapel families. By 1918 it had become divided into separate private houses and was no longer a school. The church school was also later closed and the schoolroom has today gone altogether.

(2) Brynygroes cottages orginally stood by a set of locks where the canal barges went up onto the next stretch of canal. Today the canal has gone and the houses stand at the side of a busy by-pass

(3) Like Oddfellows Street, Pelican Street stretched right across the "island" from the canal to the river. At the right hand end of the street stood the Butchers Arms.
Across the road from this once stood a grocer's shop, though this has long since gone. At the other end of the street stood a Temperance House which refused to serve alcohol and where people could lodge. The picture above was taken about 1950 but gives us an idea of what it might have been like in Victorian times.

(4) Ainon Baptist Chapel, built around 1848. A new chapel was built on the site in 1901. Chapel members baptised their children in the pool below Pont y Doctor up to 1925.

More about Gough's Buildings...