An industrialist's house built about 1880 for William Williams MP (1840-1904), a notable tinplateworks owner and Liberal party politician with a celebrated rags-to-riches biography. Morriston Hospital was built on part of the Maesygwernen estate but the mansion was retained and is now used as offices. The former stables are in private ownership. The garden with water features and stone and lead sculpture is partly incorporated in the adjacent hospice and would repay further study. The gates and lodge(?) of the main drive were taken down with the construction of the M4 but the gatres has been relocated in the hospital grounds. The mansion has become hidden by the growth of the C20th hospital complex and is not listed and was not noted in John Newman's Buildings of Wales: Glamorgan. Maesygwernen merits attention as one of Swansea's remaining industrialists' houses and for its historical associations

Maesygwernen Hall was designed by the Swansea municipal architect in an eclectic neo-classical style with a formal portico'd entrance front and informal garden front formerly with an attached octagonal conservatory. The principal rooms are accessed from the generous stair-hall . An attached top-lit billiard room on the N side of the house seems to have been loosely inspired by octagonal medieval kitchen at Glastonbury Abbey. Maesygwernen is notable for the survival of period decoration (plasterwork, tiles, and stained glass) in the ground-floor stair-hall, dining-room and drawing-room. The neo-Jacobean stair is lit by a window which incorporates a striking painted glass roundel with the initials of William Williams in the form of stylised tinplate snips.

Cellars (locked), service-rooms and servants' stair (blocked off) survive. The first-floor rooms chambers are rather plain but incorporate a room with a safe. The attic chambers were servants' rooms.

A photograph album now in the National Library of Wales shows the exterior and interior of Maesygwernen Hall in 1918 on the occasion of a visit by Lloyd George.


R.F. Suggett/RCAHMW/October 2016