Dylan Thomas called SWANSEA (Abertawe) - his birthplace - an "ugly, lovely town", an epithet which poet Paul Durcan updated to "pretty, shitty city". Both ring true. Large, sprawling and boisterous, it is the second city of Wales, with around 200,000 people, and has great aspirations to be the first; it's certainly far more Welsh than Cardiff. The city centre was massively rebuilt after devastating bomb attacks in World War II, and a jumble of tower blocks now dot the horizon. But closer inspection reveals Swansea's multifarious charms: some intact old corners of the city centre, the spacious and graceful suburb of Uplands, a wide seafront overlooking Swansea Bay and a bold marina development around the old docks. Spread throughout are some of the best-funded museums in Wales. Situated on the edge of the Gower peninsula , which holds some of the country's most popular and inspirational coastal and rural scenery, Swansea makes a logical base: transport out into the surrounding areas is good, and beds tend to be less expensive in the city than in the more picturesque parts of Gower.

 

The city's Welsh name, Abertawe, means the settlement at the mouth of the River Tawe, a grimy ditch that is slowly being teased back to life after centuries of use as a sewer for Swansea's metal trades. The first reliable mention of Swansea dates from 1099, when a Norman castle was built here as an outpost of William the Conqueror's empire. A small settlement grew near the coalfields and the sea, developing into a mining and shipbuilding centre that, by 1700, was the largest coal port in Wales. Copper smelting became the area's dominant industry in the eighteenth century, soon attracting other metal trades to pack out the lower Tawe Valley, making it one of the world's most prolific metal-bashing centres. Over the years, the valley became a five-mile stretch of rusting, stagnant land and water that has only recently begun to be re-landscaped

Alexandra Road forks right off the High Street immediately south of the train station, leading down to the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery (Tues-Sun 10am-5pm; free), a delightful Edwardian showcase of inspiring Welsh art including the huge, frantic canvases of Ceri Richards, Wales' most respected twentieth-century painter, and works by Gwen John and her brother, Augustus, whose mesmerizing portrait of Caitlin Thomas, Dylan's wife, is a real highlight. In the early nineteenth century, Swansea was a noted centre of fine porcelain production, of which the gallery houses a large collection, together with contemporary works from Nantgarw, near Cardiff.

 

The main shopping streets - considerably tarted-up in recent years - lie to the south, notably underneath the Quadrant Centre where the curving-roofed market makes a lively sight, with traditional and long-standing stalls selling local delicacies such as laver bread (a delicious savoury made from seaweed), as well as cockles trawled from the nearby Loughor estuary, typical Welsh cakes, fish and cheeses. If you're a Dylan Thomas fan, or just keen on books, it's worth popping down Wind Street to Salubrious Passage for the Dylan Thomas Bookshop , filled to the rafters with material on the poet. Wind Street has become something of a magnet for bars and restaurants recently, and it's fast become one of the city's more pleasant places to hang out and watch the world drift by.

Hourly buses leave the Quadrant depot for Uplands, a thirty-minute walk from the city centre. North of the main road, leafy avenues rise up the slopes past the sharp terraces of Cwmdonkin Park , at the centre of which is a memorial to Dylan Thomas inscribed with lines from Fern Hill , one of his best-known poems. On the eastern side of the park is Cwmdonkin Drive, a sharply rising set of solid Victorian semis, notable only for the blue plaque on no. 5, birthplace of the poet in 1914.

The spit of land between Oystermouth Road, the sea and the Tawe estuary has been christened the Maritime Quarter - tourist-board-speak for the old docks - built around a vast marina surrounded by legions of modern flats. The city's old South Dock, now cleaned and spruced up, features the enticingly old-fashioned Swansea Museum (Tues-Sun 10am-5pm; free). A small grid of nineteenth-century streets around the museum has been thoughtfully cleaned up and now houses some enjoyable cafés, pubs and restaurants.

Behind the museum, in Somerset Place, is the airy Dylan Thomas Centre , the national literature centre of Wales (Tues-Sun 10am-4.30pm; free), complete with theatre space, book and craft shops, a great café, and two galleries. One of these is devoted to Dylan Thomas, and includes a mock-up of the shed in which he wrote, in which you can see a fascinating video on his life and work. From here, Burrows Place leads down to the marina and the ever-expanding Maritime and Industrial Museum (Tues-Sun 10am-5pm; free). Taking Swansea's maritime tradition as its starting-point, the museum presents a lively history of the city, and includes a working woollen mill, where rows of black machinery, greasy with the wool's lanolin, are operated by staff who gradually turn raw fleece into blankets. A large number of vehicles include an old tram that once rattled along the seafront to Mumbles, and a rare example of Gilbern cars, Wales's principal - and long-dead - contribution to the motor industry.