“It’s sad. I think it killed the town,” says Debbie, sitting in a cafe in Bridgend and recalling the closure of Ford’s south Wales engine plant almost five years ago. “There were lots of men and women working there at the end.”

During its 40 years of operations, workers at Bridgend Ford produced 22m engines for Ford, Volvo and Jaguar cars, before it closed quietly in September 2020 during ongoing Covid restrictions.

Debbie’s husband was one of 1,700 people who worked for the biggest employer in the town, located between Cardiff and Swansea, when the factory’s closure was announced in 2019. After about 30 years of service, he took early retirement in his late 50s when he received his redundancy payment.

At the time, many other Ford workers pinned their hopes on taking their skills to a car plant planned for a neighbouring industrial estate by the chemicals company Ineos, where it intended to build its Grenadier 4x4 vehicle. However, the company owned by billionaire Brexit-backer Sir Jim Ratcliffe subsequently cancelled the development, opting to build the “British” vehicle in France.

“Ford workers still meet up,” says Debbie, highlighting the ongoing feeling of community. However, the closure led to the workforce scattering to various other employers – including carmaker Aston Martin’s plant at nearby St Athan – while others retrained.

“Welsh cloud region”

Coming up for five years later, the Ford site is still empty, but an industry of the future has big plans.

The US-based datacentre company Vantage bought the land for a reported £27.5m in 2024, the biggest industrial transaction in south Wales last year. In recent weeks it has submitted a planning application to the council to build a huge datacentre complex on the site, representing a multibillion-pound investment.

“We recognise the importance of industry in Bridgend,” says Vantage in its application, stating that the cluster of 10 datacentres will “lay the foundation for future prosperity and regional economic regeneration”.

Future prosperity may, however, be some way off. Subject to gaining planning approval, Vantage intends to start construction early next year, and will build the complex over three phases up to 2040.

Once operational, it is pledging 600 full-time jobs on site, with a further 350 in the supply chain. It says the average salary of Vantage employees is £75,000, more than double the average salary in Bridgend, or Wales.

The company, backed by a consortium of investors including DigitalBridge Group, Silver Lake, Australian Super and others already operates one datacentre 30 miles east along the M4 motorway at Newport and has received planning permission for another in the Vale of Glamorgan. Vantage writes in its planning statement to the council that these three locations would “form the cornerstone of a Welsh cloud region”.

A company spokesperson said its expansion in south Wales was linked to “many factors … from the availability of land, power and skilled labour to the support of the local councils and national government, and customer demand”.

The company also estimates the development will help the town by generating £8.3m a year in business rates for the local authority, although in Wales these are pooled between councils and distributed centrally.

More money for the area would clearly be welcomed by locals, many of whom bemoan the state of public services.

On a sweltering weekday morning, groups of retired women are dodging soaring temperatures inside Bridgend’s Aroma cafe. Many are former colleagues meeting for regular coffee catch-ups, where the lack of local public transport or the disappointing state of Bridgend’s town centre with many vacant stores are common themes.

“It’s all right if you vape, or want a Turkish barber,” says Susan, sitting at one of the tables. “You don’t come into town if you want an outfit.”

Home of heavy industry

Many in Bridgend feel they have heard promises from large companies before.

While the town itself was never home to heavy industry, the surrounding region relied on it, and the Tata steelworks at Port Talbot is just 14 miles up the road. When Ford opened in 1980, the area was already home to dozens of car parts companies and it was hoped the automotive sector would take the place of a declining coal industry, which employed 250,000 in Wales at its peak.

Significant numbers of Welsh miners took part in the 1984-85 miners’ strike, led by Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Mineworkers. While the action ultimately failed to prevent pit closures, it left a lasting legacy in Wales’s coalmining heartlands.

In the aftermath of the strike, Wales had some success in attracting foreign investment, often to Bridgend, helped by its proximity to the M4. However, many locals can reel off a list of the large multinationals that have come and gone, including LG and Bosch.

While Ford’s closure did not cause a rise in unemployment in Bridgend, where it remains about 3.5%, according to official figures, the economic inactivity rate – measuring people neither in work nor looking for a job – has climbed 6% since the pandemic. While this picture is repeated across the UK since Covid, the rate in Bridgend stands at 30.6%, significantly higher than the British average of 21%.

The main political parties are looking for ways to tackle persistent economic problems, but have differing views on how best to achieve it.

Reform UK is hoping to capitalise on voters’ dissatisfaction, in a town that voted 54.6% for leave in the Brexit referendum, at a time when it is setting out its stall in Wales before next May’s elections for the Welsh parliament.

“The town centre is lacking vibrancy,” says Caroline Jones, who hopes to be selected as Reform’s candidate for the Senedd for Bridgend. . Recalling a busier time, when the high street was home to more shops and bank branches, she says: “Our aim is to enhance town centres, to bring local employment and to level up the playing field.”

Jones, who previously served as the Senedd member for south west Wales for Ukip and as an independent, was Reform’s candidate for Bridgend in last year’s general election, coming second to Labour with a 19% share of the vote.

“I want to see industry and manufacturing brought back into our area, which obviously needs a lot of planning,” she adds.

It is unclear how Reform intends to attract this investment, and many of the policies Jones and the party are proposing – including lowering corporation tax or raising the income tax threshold to £20,000 – are not devolved powers and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of the Senedd.

Back to the future

It is perhaps unsurprising that Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, launched his party’s campaign for the 2026 Senedd elections in nearby Port Talbot, where 2,500 jobs at the steelworks have been lost after the closure of the blast furnaces. It was where he made his pitch to Welsh voters, vowing to reopen closed coalmines and restart blast furnaces to usher in a new era of domestic steel making, fuelled by Welsh coal.

The party has not yet named its leader in Wales and does not have any Senedd members. However, since Farage’s June visit to Port Talbot, Reform has topped two polls of voting intentions, with nationalists Plaid Cymru in second, pushing Labour into third place.

Such an outcome would be a serious defeat for Welsh Labour, which has run the government in Cardiff ever since devolution nearly 27 years ago. The first minister, Eluned Morgan, is hoping to overturn a slump in voter support for Labour, but has said she is taking the threat of Reform “very seriously”. However, even if Reform wins the largest number of seats in the Senedd, a new more proportional voting system makes it unlikely it will be able to form a majority government.

Reform has just gained its first councillor, the youngest ever in the borough of Bridgend, in the shape of Owain Clatworthy, who clinched a surprise council byelection win in May, just days before his 21st birthday.

He has already gained some local recognition. Being photographed by the Guardian outside the council offices, a passerby claps him on the shoulder and congratulates him on “doing a fine job”.

Clatworthy grew up in care from the age of six and now helps others in a similar situation as a support worker, but insists a job in heavy industry would appeal to some of his peers.

“I don’t doubt that if you ask a young person who is struggling to get by, like I was a couple of years ago, I’d have snatched your arm off to maybe get down the mines,” Clatworthy says.

“Coal runs through our veins in Wales,” says Bridgend resident Carwyn Jones, a former first minister of Wales and now a Labour peer, “but the mines have been flooded, capped, built over”. He does not believe Wales’s future prosperity lies in a return to past industries.

“A word I’d use to describe it, which is a particularly technical term, is bonkers,” he says. “Is that what we are saying to people, ‘That’s what the Welsh want, to be stuck down a hole in the ground again’?”

In recent decades Bridgend has moved away from reliance on one large employer, Jones says, which makes the town “economically safer”.

“We’ve got all these hidden gems,” he says, listing hi-tech local companies including Spectrum Technologies, which makes laser-marking equipment for aircraft wires and cables.

“Green shoots”

A burst of industry is visible and audible in the town centre, where there is a cluster or cranes and workers in hi-vis. Bridgend College’s new campus is under construction, scheduled to open next September. The £75m project will bring 1,000 of the college’s 7,500 students and staff into central Bridgend, which the principal, Vivienne Buckley, believes will help regeneration efforts, while it is hoped the campus theatre will bolster the growing night-time economy.

“It’s the biggest investment that’s gone into Bridgend in generations,” says Buckley of the scheme which is two-thirds funded by the Welsh government, with the remaining third covered by the college. “People in Bridgend are excited about it. It’s not a panacea, but a huge opportunity.”

The vocational further education college retrained some of Ford’s workers and has been responsible for training Tata Steel’s apprentices for 15 years. However, the region’s shift away from manufacturing means Bridgend’s future workers require different skills.

“What we need to do is produce students who are able to adapt to the needs of the workforce they enter,” she says . “Even 10 years ago it was more about a bespoke skill set, now industry seems to be looking for a broad base of knowledge that can be moulded into what they need.”

Bridgend’s Labour MP, Chris Elmore, whose constituency now includes the town, after boundary changes, insists there are “green shoots” in the local economy, listing the college development, new hospitality venues and housing developments.

Elmore has been lobbying for an AI growth zone in south Wales, and is hopeful such projects could be achieved through better cooperation between Labour-run administrations in Westminster and Cardiff.

“I think actually that relationship [between the UK government and Welsh Labour] is beginning to show positive signs, and it’s our job to make that case.”

However, it is unclear whether Bridgend residents will be patient if they don’t see improvements to the local area and public services. Back at the Aroma cafe, there is a weariness with the Labour-run Welsh government, but little appreciation for Reform either.

“I am not staunch Labour come hell and high water like many here,” says Ann. “I voted independent in the last election.”

“I don’t like Nigel Farage at all,” adds Jennifer Owen. “I think he is a dangerous man.”