Save the Dylan Thomas Centre

The Dylan Thomas Centre, run by the City and County of Swansea, was opened by former US President Jimmy Carter in 1995 as the focal point of the UK Year of Literature and Writing 1995, and as, thereafter, the foremost venue in the world for the celebration of one of Wales’s most famous sons, and as a vibrant centre for literature and the arts in general.

Most of the world’s greatest writers have appeared at the Centre over the years, at the same time as the Centre has nurtured grass-roots talent and provided a platform for all manner of performances, from multi-media community celebrations to fund-raising events for charities, from popular entertainments to international conferences. It plays a crucial role in the cultural life of Swansea and has burnished the name of Dylan Thomas both at home and abroad, attracting thousands of visitors to Swansea from all over the world, and playing a key role in the £3.6m that the Dylan Thomas ‘industry’ is said to be worth to the economy of Swansea.

Towards the end of 2010, when Swansea Council, in common with local authorities throughout the UK, was forced to consider major cuts in expenditure, it became clear that the Dylan Thomas Centre was facing an uncertain future. It was announced that the University of Wales would be taking the Centre over, although these plans have not yet been finalised.

Neither the Council nor the UoW have been able to provide assurances that the Centre will be able to continue in its present form. What is at risk, the Centre’s supporters believe, is both its essence as a cultural centre and the building’s entitlement to call itself, in any purposeful sense, the Dylan Thomas Centre. Swansea needs, in the words of the distinguished theatre director Michael Bogdanov, to ‘Keep Dylan Thomas in the Dylan Thomas Centre’, and this can be achieved only by maintaining the Centre as it was established in 1995, during the UK Year of Literature and Writing, with its definitive Dylan Thomas exhibition, its year-round literary and arts programme, its annual Dylan Thomas Festival, its bookshop, and its bar and catering facilities. These are minimum conditions for the proper exploitation of the Centre’s potential as a formidable cultural powerhouse – and as the focal point of the Swansea-centred but worldwide celebrations, in 2014, of the one hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth. Sadly, the current uncertainty is already having the effect of blighting the Centre’s artistic programme.

We believe that as Swansea was once, in the industrial era, Wales’s ‘intelligent town’ it is now, in post-industrial times, Wales’s city of culture, and that the intelligent response to hard times, rather than diminution and retrenchment, is to play Swansea’s cultural card for all its worth, with a reinvigorated Dylan Thomas Centre at the heart of the city’s cultural life.