The 20th century brought an explosion in the UK‘s population. A second industrial revolution saw yet more flock to urban centres and chase the investment boom, meaning swathes of Britain now needed more resources, including water.
But how does a city get more water?
One option may be to import bottled water, another to tunnel further down into the ground.
For the authorities in Liverpool in 1965, there was only one feasible option: flood the Welsh border town of Capel Celyn to feed a new reservoir.
It would stir anger among the community, spark a renewed Welsh nationalism, and above all else, drive people out of their ancestral homes.
Capel Celyn was a rural community slightly north of Bala, home to 67 people.
It was like any other small village of its time, consisting simply of a post office, a general shop, a cemetery, a school, and a Methodist church after which it was named.
In 1965, this all changed, and a vast body of water absorbed every functioning part of the settlement.
The road to this point began in 1957 when a private bill sponsored by Liverpool City Council was brought before Parliament to develop a water reservoir in the Tryweryn Valley, of which the flooding of Capel Celyn was a part.
By obtaining authority to follow through with the events directly from Parliament, the city council avoided the need to gain the consent from the Welsh authorities that would be affected. It is something that Liverpool City Council would apologise for 40 years later.
Despite 35 out of the 36 Welsh MPs voting against the notion, the bill was passed in 1962, and so Capel Celyn’s fate was sealed.
When the Afon Tryweryn valley was flooded three years later, the village and its buildings were all lost. Twelve houses and farms were similarly lost, and 48 out of the 67 people who lived there lost their homes forever.
In the decades since then, Capel Celyn has occasionally reared its head during bouts of extreme weather.
In 2022 — the UK’s hottest year on record — many of the town’s tree stumps and structural remnants could be seen after a heatwave drained the valley of its water.
Fragments of pottery and kitchenware have also been spotted by revellers hoping to find any hint at the lost village.
Those who knew it say Capel Celyn embodied a sense of “Welshness”, a place that didn’t fit into Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s vision of a Britain built on science.
During his 2017 Raymond Williams lecture, Welsh actor Michael Sheen described the destruction as one of the worst humiliations on Wales by the British in the country’s history.
The flooding itself sparked predictable pushback among the population and ushered in a new age of nationalism in the country.
Some have said it also laid the groundwork for the future devolution of political powers to Wales.
Even as late as 2015 — on the 50th anniversary of the flooding – on the general election campaign, the Conservative Party used the event to campaign on the St David’s Day Agreement which would give further powers to the Welsh government.
