Swansea was made a city in 1969 and to see it in old photographs from forty years ago is to see almost another place.

The award-winning Swansea Maritime Quarter which is now filled with yachts, motor cruisers and lined with desirable apartments was then ringed by dingy sheds and the South Dock partially infilled with builders waste.

It was very much the wrong end of town and at the end of a working life that had begun in 1859. At that time it was the second of the Victorian docks that helped convert Swansea from a village by the sea into one of the great ports of the 19th century world.

In 1969 you could also have seen the vast bulk of Weaver's flour mill which used to tower above where Sainsbury's is now.

It was one of the first reinforced concrete buildings built in Britain and was demolished in the early 1980s; a column from it is preserved alongside the river near New Cut Bridge.

If you had stood at that point and looked up what was then a grey old river you would have seen mostly dereliction on both sides of it.

For then the landscape was pockmarked by the remains of old copperworks, derelict vessels moored in the river and slag heaps.

To see it now is to see the Lower Swansea Valley refreshed and re-energised by projects that have, in the intervening forty years, made it a fit place for people again.

Kingfishers dart across a river that people take fish from and you can cycle in clean air all the way from St Thomas to the new Liberty Stadium through a green corridor full of wildlife.

The remains of old copperworks are still there about four feet down at the Hafod and White Rock sites and await archaeological discovery. /p>

They are the Industrial Revolution's equivalent of Pompeii or Herculaneum; an unwitting gift from the past to us in the present. Frozen worlds of stone and metal lie beneath our feet with stories still to be told about people and copper ore.

In the city the inheritance of largely Victorian and Edwardian architecture is slowly giving way as new buildings pierce the sky as Swansea confidently sloughs off a stony carapace and dons a new one of glass and steel.

All cities are a work in progress and Swansea is no different. In 1969 Swansea was a former centre of the mettalurgical industries with a history in copper and an uncertain future.

Forty years later it is a confident post-industrial city that thrives beneath clean skies and beside clean waters. Its population now works mainly in the public and services sectors with heavy industry consigned to the local history books.

There are still a lot of places in Wales with more past to them than future - Swansea is not one of them...