Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains the industrial heritage of South Wales, where regional, national and working-class identities have been strongly intertwined. It shows that the more urbanized and industrialized South Wales, with its increasingly anglicized and more heterogeneous mining communities, had a complicated and strained relationship to a representation of Wales that had been essentially agrarian and Welsh-speaking. The book explores an important mining and industrial region in Australia, centered on the former 'steel city' of Newcastle and its hinterland, in the state of New South Wales. It also shows that industrial heritage in Japan has subsequently been placed predominantly in the framework of the national narrative on the country's modernization, rather than regional identity. The book argues that from the late 1970s, industrial heritage in Greater Pittsburgh was recognized as a measure for urban renewal.