For 25 years, the Phoenix Centre has sat at the heart of Townhill — a community hub that has weathered the estate’s hardest moments and quietly shaped countless lives.
As the centre marks its anniversary, few people embody its story better than Zoe Murphy: born and raised on the hill, a University of Wales Trinity Saint David graduate, and now a project coordinator at the very centre she first walked into as a young dance teacher.
Run by the Hill Community Development Trust, the Phoenix is a social enterprise that ploughs any profit back into the community. It was set up to tackle poverty and drive regeneration on one of Wales’s first purpose-built council estates.
(Image: Phoenix Centre)
For Murphy, it has been a thread running through her whole adult life.
She became a mother at 18 but never let go of her ambition to go to university — and found her chance close to home, at what was then the Swansea Institute of Higher Education, now UWTSD, which had a campus in Townhill at the time.
“I was very academic, so going to university was always part of the plan — it was just about finding a way to make it work,” she said. “With a campus based in Townhill at the time, accessing education within my own community made all the difference while raising my daughter.”
She graduated in 2002 with a degree in English Studies, Drama and Media — a course that chimed with her love of storytelling and performance — while already running a successful dance school locally.
She remembers her student years as “one of the happiest times” of her life, and a foundation for the freelance work that still shapes her practice today.
Her career since has never followed a single track. She began in dance — teaching, choreographing and creating dance theatre — before moving into community arts and engagement.
“That’s where I really developed my voice as an artist,” she said.
A city-wide community dance project later reconnected her with UWTSD, leading to six years working in community engagement at the university. She has also worked across schools, children’s residential care, prisons and work-based learning, and in 2018 completed a qualification in Post Compulsory Education and Training.
Her bond with the Phoenix spans much of her life. She used the centre for her dance classes when it first opened, as well as for social activities and community events — so when she joined the organisation in 2025 as a project coordinator, it felt like a natural continuation of a relationship stretching back a quarter of a century.
In her current role she runs the weekly youth club, coordinates community groups and helps develop local events.
“I really believe in the power the centre has,” she said. “It’s in the heart of Townhill, and I see the hard graft it takes to keep it going and its absolute importance to our community.”
For Murphy, the work is personal. She is acutely aware of the negative perceptions that have dogged the area — perceptions she says miss the truth of the place.
“What I’ve experienced growing up and working here is strength, compassion, and a real sense of people looking out for each other,” she said. “There’s a strong identity here, and a pride that people don’t always see from the outside.”
That pride was tested five years ago. In May 2021, Mayhill made national headlines after two hours of violent disorder in which cars were torched and homes attacked, drawing condemnation from the then home secretary and the label “war zone.”
Eighteen people were later jailed for a combined total of more than 83 years, with South Wales Police later apologising for its handling of the night after an independent report. But residents have always pointed to what came next — neighbours pouring out to clear up and support those who had been targeted — as the truer picture of the hill.
In the aftermath, the council announced major investment in the area, covering sport and youth facilities, roads and the environment, and an independent review was set up to support the community.
The Phoenix has remained a constant through it all. The centre features in a new report by the Wales Centre for Public Policy examining poverty stigma in Swansea and the role of local services, and was visited recently by BBC Wales as part of its reporting on life on the estate.
It is far from the centre’s first turn in the spotlight for the right reasons. In 2024 it added a new play area for local children — one of a steady stream of community-led improvements that have made it, in our own past reporting, one of Swansea’s busiest and most vibrant community centres.
Murphy sees the 25th anniversary as a moment to reflect — and a reminder of what the centre has meant to Townhill and neighbouring Mayhill since it opened at a time of real need.
“Spaces like that don’t last 25 years without commitment, and without people believing in what it offers,” she said.
She is clear, too, that the work depends on sustained support.
“Places like the Phoenix Centre show what’s possible when communities are properly resourced,” she said. “It shouldn’t be the exception.”
For her, the centre stands as “a beacon of what good community work looks like, and what can happen when people are given the space and support to make something work.”
Murphy, who also writes, captured the spirit of the estate in a poem composed for the centre’s anniversary. Titled “The Hill Dwellers,” it turns the outside world’s assumptions on their head — closing on a line of defiant belonging.
