ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to compare workers' settlements in both Britain and mainland Europe in order to evaluate what distinctive features may be located in such townships, particularly with regard to institutional buildings and features. Planned, and largely unplanned, industrial workers' settlements existed in very large numbers both in post-medieval continental Europe and within Britain during the first intensive global industrialisation. Their religious and institutional buildings are a very friable resource and often their appearance and plan are unrecorded and can only be recovered by recording the field evidence. The second generation of entrepreneurs often moved from substantial houses set in their worker settlements to larger mansions set in large parks adjacent to the townships of their workforce. The rebuilding of the main chapel of the worker settlement of Morriston at Swansea by tinplate industrialists was also completed by the high steeple which earned this particular structure the epithet of the 'Cathedral of Welsh Nonconformity'.
