How grim was my valley?

WHEN the factory-builders and mineowners descended upon Blaenavon in the Welsh valleys in the 1880s, heritage was the last thing on their minds.

The hillsides were raped, mineshafts sunk with abandon, slag spewed on to every ridge and into every furrow. Workers were housed as cheaply as possible in remote positions that ensured they had only one place to do their shopping: in the company's "tommy shop", where prices could be kept high. They weren't to envisage that in 120 years the world's heritage establishment would come to reward their efforts with the same accolade awarded to the builders of the Taj Mahal and the Egyptian pyramids.

Last December, Unesco announced that the Blaenavon industrial landscape - a vast, six-mile by three-mile area encompassing the town as well as the surrounding hillsides - had been granted the status of a World Heritage Site. The mine, the ironworks, slag heaps, workers cottages and all are to be restored and preserved. Conservation areas have been set up, 82 buildings listed, 12 scheduled ancient monuments designated. Periodic visits are promised from Unesco's inspectors to ensure that everyone is doing their bit to preserve this chosen valley.

At first sight, Blaenavon seems an unlikely recipient of such attention. At present, the town is not exactly the most sought-after address. In the one and only shopping street, every other shop is boarded up, among them the chip shop. Some of the houses have been abandoned, and even some of those that are occupied have seen better days: in one, a 6ft tree sprouts from the chimney. Even the old tommy shops seem under threat: a sign with the ominous message "use it or lose it" is posted in the window of the post office/ stores in the former miners' suburb, Forgeside.

The population has collapsed since the mine closed in 1980. In its industrial heyday, 25,000 people lived in the town; that is now down to 6,000, an astounding 70 per cent of whom are aged over 60. A measure of how distant Blaenavon feels from the boom which has swept over London, the South-East, Bristol and even nearby Cardiff, the average house in the local district, Torfaen, has been stuck at about £50,000 for the past 10 years. Two-bedroom miners' cottages sell for about £24,000 and three-bedroom ones for £36,000, though a new kitchen and bathroom, according to Janet Jones, of Davis & Co, the town's sole estate agent, will push that up to £42,000.

Yet great things are expected from World Heritage Site status. Perhaps never has anywhere been showered with so much heritage money in so short a space of time. There is £6 million heading for the old coal mine, now reborn as the Big Pit mining museum, and £2 million for the restoration of the old St Peter's school, a currently derelict Grade II listed building.

CADW, the Welsh heritage body, has promised what it takes to restore the old ironworks, one of the largest in the world before it was closed in 1902, and the place where the Bessemer steel-making process was perfected. A further £750,000 is being sought from the European Union towards the restoration of the hillsides, parts of which are currently a wasteland, where foxes burrow into slag heaps and the odd sheep lies drowned in a swollen stream.

Homeowners aren't missing out on the feast, either. An area encompassing 900 houses has been declared a "Neighbourhood Renewal Area", where owners are to be offered grants of at least 75 per cent to restore their homes to their original outward appearance. Hardwood window sashes are being put back. The 19th-century houses were all originally built of rough-hewn ironstone, which gives the higgledy-piggledy effect of a drystone wall. But over the years, many miners rather touchingly used their redundancy money to pebbledash their houses. That is now to go, though the stone has proved problematic to restore. "The grouting between the stones was very poor," says Louise Fradd, of the Blaenavon Co-ordinating Committee, "so they are having to be rendered instead."

Interestingly, the quality of housing plunged as the industrial revolution proceeded. When the ironworks was constructed in the 1780s, workers were housed in well-proportioned, double-fronted cottages with large gardens. The mineworkers, who arrived a century later, were squashed into a small settlement called Forgeside, more than 1,000ft up on a treeless hillside. The houses had no more than backyards and the streets were given names like A Row and B Row.

No one is more surprised that anyone would want to preserve these houses than Mike Read, who, until 1987, worked at a neighbouring mine and now makes a living as a guide at the Big Pit Museum.

"The houses were very, very cold," he says. "When you got a good coal fire going, you would be roasted in the front and frozen in the back. We used to have an annual allowance of 12 tons of coal a year, but then it was reduced to eight tons a year, one of which we used to donate to the widows of miners who had been killed, because they didn't get an allowance.

"There used to be stone floors, and a toilet at the bottom of the garden. If someone told me years ago that people would want to come to Blaenavon and pay to go down a coal mine, I'd have laughed at them. And as for the slag heaps they are leaving for posterity, they are nothing like the old ones: there was a big fuss and most of them were purged after the Aberfan disaster."

The clash of the two cultures - the down-to-earth, proud world of the miner and the rather precious world of the heritage industry - is only just beginning. With the granting of World Heritage Site status, there has been a revival in interest in commercial premises in Blaenavon, but not from chip-shop owners. "We've had interest from people wanting to set up galleries selling oil and watercolour paintings," says Ms Jones, of Davis & Co.

Spurred on by the heritage money, outsiders are moving into Blaenavon. One of them is Martin Walker, who says he was driven out of his native Bristol by rising house prices. "I've bought two properties," he says, "one which I live in and the other which I am doing up as an investment. I've always liked industrial landscapes and I find old coal tips attractive."

It is not just these sentiments which are lost on the likes of Mr Read; it is the easy money of the heritage industry. Even when the mines were open and Blaenavon was in full employment, life in the town was a hand-to-mouth existence: miners were paid on piece rates, and received no money for the time it used to take to walk the four miles from the bottom of the mineshaft to the coalface. The mining community, Mr Read remembers, was so insular that they would not even mix with people from the next valley. "We used to socialise with the people we worked with. Once or twice a year the clubs would organise an outing to the seaside, but the only other time we'd leave the valley was when we used to go to Newport to buy clothes for the Whitsun walks, when the churches would each have a march.

"We didn't travel much and we weren't very educated. I've learned a lot about the place since I started working in the museum. I lived here and worked in the coalmine all my life and yet I wasn't even aware that there was an ironworks across the river."

• Pictures: Christopher Jones