SWANSEA: The car park is coming down, but the saint who welcomed you into town is saved for the museum

For four decades the first thing to greet drivers arriving in Swansea along Oystermouth Road was a red-brick multi-storey and a little bishop in a mitre welcoming them to the St David’s Shoppers Car Park. The car park is coming down. The bishop is going to the museum.

The signs were taken off the building and handed to Swansea Museum for safekeeping before demolition began, Swansea Council says, after “lots of requests” to save them once the car park’s fate was announced.

“They were part of the everyday landscape, a signal to thousands of motorists every day that they were entering the city centre, and over the years people clearly developed a fondness for them,” council leader Cllr Rob Stewart said.

“So before the demolition got underway, we removed the signs and they are now with Swansea Museum for safekeeping and future display.”

The 375-space car park closed for good on 13 July, the same morning the long-delayed Copr Bay North multi-storey opened its 628 spaces across the road at £1 an hour.

Now the machines are in. Demolition crews are stripping the decks floor by floor, and when they finish the site between Swansea Arena, Y Storfa and St David’s Church will be cleared for the next act.

That act is Porth Copr, the council’s scheme with regeneration firm Urban Splash for offices, learning and commercial space, with new public spaces around the church. Surveys and ground investigations have already been done ahead of the main build.

From shopping centre to pop-up park to Porth Copr

The car park outlived the shopping centre it was built to serve. St David’s Shopping Centre opened in 1982, red brick like its car park, with a market hall of small traders upstairs and an octagonal corner building meant for a restaurant that never arrived, so S4C used it to film Heno instead.

The council and Welsh Government bought the complex in 2011, and by the spring of 2021 it had been flattened, its traders scattered, Cwtch Café among them to Caer Street, and the site hoarded off on one of the busiest walking routes between the city centre and the new Arena.

The council’s answer that May was a temporary pop-up park: a rain garden, living roofs and container units for food start-ups, designed with Natural Resources Wales to keep the route open and green until a developer was found. The same plan pencilled in the demolition of the St David’s car park and its neighbour, the Llys Dewi Sant retirement flats.

The flats went first. Residents had moved out in 2019 to a new block on the old Vetch Field, and the 30-year-old building came down in the autumn of 2022 after a spell as the site office for the £135m Copr Bay district.

The car park hung on for four more years, kept in service until Copr Bay North could take its motorists, while the wider site was branded first Swansea Central North and now Porth Copr, with Urban Splash confirmed as the council’s partner.

Cllr Stewart called the demolition “another visible sign of progress as we continue delivering our long-term vision for Swansea city centre”.

“This is a significant site in the heart of Swansea and its transformation will help support investment, jobs and city centre activity for years to come,” he said.

The council lists Porth Copr alongside the Arena, Y Storfa and 71/72 Kingsway in a regeneration programme that has been remaking the city centre for the best part of a decade.

Copr Bay North, the car park that replaced St David’s, has a story of its own: its original contractor collapsed mid-build and it opened more than four years after the rest of the district, with the five shop units beneath it still being marketed.

There is no date yet for when the signs will go on show. When they do, the next people welcomed by the little bishop will be museum visitors rather than motorists looking for a space.