The Heads of the Valleys

Few places could better illustrate the complexities of locality making than the Heads of the Valleys. The area selected as the south Wales WISERD locality is today highly recognisable as a locality of both political and popular construction. It is enshrined in much Welsh government policy and recognised as a particular bounded space by many stakeholders working in the area. The Heads of the Valleys is also recognisable as an area characterised politically as suffering specific, acute and long-standing social and economic challenges as the result of economic restructuring throughout the twentieth century. For this reason, it can be thought of as a problematic locality. However, this political construction has not always been so. The south Wales valleys were not always framed as suffering from socio-economic hardship, and the Heads of the Valleys was not always invoked as a political area.