The wonderful finale of the BBC’s hit comedy Gavin & Stacey on Christmas Day brought further fame to Barry in South Wales. It’s a place that has a place in my heart thanks to family seaside memories and visits to its long-gone scrapyard for old steam locomotives.

Last weekend, I took my son Owen for a short break in my hometown, Cardiff. As the rest of the country shivered under blizzards or sheltered from the icy rain, we made the short trip to Barry Island, and were rewarding with a few minutes of glorious winter sunshine. When I was at school, I regularly took the train from Heath High Level in Cardiff to Barry Island, and our Sunday visit brought so many memories flooding back.

Barry is a town that saw explosive growth during the later stages of the industrial revolution. Barely a hundred people lived there in the middle of the 19th century, but the entrepreneur David Davies of Llandinam saw its potential as a port. Davies was known as Davies the Ocean after the coal mining company that made his fortune. Like many Welsh coal tycoons, he was frustrated by the delays and cost involved in exporting their black gold from Cardiff, and vowed to create a rival port less than nine miles away at Barry. As he exclaimed, “We have five million tons of coal and can fill a thundering good dock the first day we open it!”