Mid Wales and Powys

Powys is the largest county in Wales by area and one of the most sparsely populated. It is a county of uplands, river valleys and small market towns rather than cities — a rural heart of the country, sharing a long border with England to the east.

The name Powys is ancient: it recalls one of the early medieval kingdoms of Wales. The modern county takes in the historic areas of Montgomeryshire, Radnorshire and Brecknockshire, and it is in the old Montgomeryshire, in the north of Powys, that Newtown lies.

Newtown (in Welsh, Y Drenewydd — literally "the new town") sits on the River Severn in northern Powys. For a town of its size it has an outsized place in industrial and social history.

It was a centre of the Welsh woollen industry; it was the birthplace of the social reformer Robert Owen (1771–1858); and it was the home of the mail-order business that Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones built from 1859, whose landmark Royal Welsh Warehouse building, beside the railway station, opened in 1879. The neighbouring parish of Llanllwchaiarn, just across the river, is the recorded birthplace of Sir Pryce himself.

The River Severn — Afon Hafren in Welsh — rises in the hills of Mid Wales and flows past Newtown on its long course to the sea. Its valley gave the district level ground, water power and, in time, a route for the railway.

It is a landscape of green hills, hedged fields and scattered farms: quiet, working countryside rather than dramatic mountain scenery. This is the everyday backdrop against which the family's earliest documented history unfolds.

For centuries, Mid Wales was defined by the woollen and flannel trade. Sheep on the hills produced the wool; the fast streams of the valleys powered the mills; and towns such as Newtown spun, wove and finished the cloth. Newtown was sometimes called the "Leeds of Wales" for its woollen industry.

This trade is the essential context for the family's story. It was as a draper — a dealer in cloth — that Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones began, and it was Welsh flannel that he sold, by post, to the rest of Britain. The land and its trade did not merely surround the family; they gave it its livelihood.

To understand the Pryce-Jones name is, in part, to understand this corner of Mid Wales: a Welsh-speaking, chapel-going, wool-working country of small towns and river valleys. Later generations would travel far from it.