When the news broke in the autumn of 2023 that the blast furnaces at the steelworks in Port Talbot, south Wales, were closing, the headlines were laced with emotion: “devastating”, “fear”, “end of an era”. For many in the town, it wasn’t just the loss of 3,000 jobs, it was as though part of the town’s identity was being taken away.
Such emotional reactions are not just nostalgia or sentimentality. They’re a powerful example of what researchers call “place attachment”, the deep, often unspoken bonds we form with the places that shape our lives.
My own research has explored how people in Newport formed emotional attachments to the former Llanwern steelworks from when it was built in the 1960s.
