Smelting and Selling: the Vivians and the Copper trade in nineteenth-century Swansea

Room 1

Booking essential.

Vivian and Sons is perhaps Swansea’s best known nineteenth-century copper firm. They epitomised the town’s rise to fame as a centre of the global copper trade. This talk looks behind their successful image at some of the challenges and difficulties faced by the Vivians as they worked to establish their copper smelting business at Hafod. Drawing on evidence from the extensive Vivian correspondence held at the National Library of Wales, their efforts to produce high quality copper and to build up a substantial customer base for their products will be explored alongside their relationships with Swansea’s other leading copper firms.

All activities are free.