Dylan’s birthplace

Number 5, Cwmdonkin Drive

Dylan Thomas was born in the upstairs front bedroom of this house on October 27 1914, and he lived here until November of 1934, when he moved to London, but he would return often until his parents sold-up and moved to Bishopston in 1937. He later described the house variously as his “provincial villa”, his “Glamorgan villa” and his “mortgaged villa in an upper-class professional row.”

Thomas was acutely aware of the middle-class, suburban respectability of his home and much of his behaviour and posturing can be seen as a reaction against it. But he also enjoyed the comfort and security this “mortgaged villa” afforded him, and in an early poem describes…..

Leaning from windows over a
length of lawns,
On tumbling hills admiring the
Sea