Behind the locked doors of one of Swansea’s most familiar buildings, the clocks stopped in 2018.
The former University of Wales Trinity Saint David campus at Mount Pleasant — built as the Swansea Technical College — has stood largely empty since the university moved out, and new images by B&R Urban Explorers show what seven years of silence look like.
The red-brick landmark opened in 1931, and a brass plaque still fixed to its wall records the £10,000 given by the Miners’ Welfare Committee towards “the erection and equipment of this building” — a gift from the coalfield to the town’s education.
Inside, the explorers found the building’s grandest features intact: herringbone parquet corridors lined with oak panelling — the flooring in places lifted and stacked against the walls — and arched leaded windows throwing sunlight across empty stairwells.
At the building’s heart, a caged lift shaft rises through the main staircase — its trellis-gated lift still parked behind “do not use in the event of fire” signs that will never be needed again.
The campus’s last working occupants have left their signage behind: South Wales Police ran its Professional Development Unit (West) from the building in partnership with what was then Swansea Metropolitan University, training officers and staff.
Bilingual direction signs still point the way to the International Centre and the police unit — and one door bears the crest of UWTSD Wuhan Ligong College, the university’s 2016 partnership with its Chinese counterpart.
Elsewhere the rooms sit as their last users left them: a lecture theatre stripped back to its timber tiers, whiteboards still faintly marked, and a sports cupboard where the rackets and balls wait for a lesson that ended years ago.
The blue-and-white tiled showers — curtains still on their rails — survive from the building’s sporting decades.
Time has not been kind everywhere: ceilings have collapsed into a kitchen, training rooms sit heaped with broken furniture behind “DIM MYNEDIAD” signs, and damp is working at the plaster.
But the building’s next chapter has already begun on site: breeze-block walls and scaffold towers now stand across some corridors — early works linked to the plan unveiled in March to convert the landmark into luxury flats, brought forward by a former Swansea rugby international turned actor.
For the explorers, the visit was about the record: “Walking through today, old police signs, photographs and abandoned rooms offer a fascinating glimpse into its past,” the group said. “It’s amazing how much history still remains within these walls.”
The group describes its work as preserving Welsh history through photography — and its images of the Frankie & Benny’s frozen in time in Llanelli drew a wide audience earlier this year. Its cameras have also been inside the closed Stradey Park Hotel, found left powered-up with the beds still made. And the city’s explorers have previously revealed the hidden interior of the long-abandoned Elysium Theatre on High Street.
From miners’ pennies to luxury flats, the Technical College has tracked a century of the city’s fortunes — and for now, its corridors belong to the dust, the pigeons and the occasional camera.
