Before 2001 it might surprise some that that's not the reason why Cardiff has more for a city centre, in 1931 and 1941 Swansea was pretty much the same size as Cardiff but because Swansea was an industrial giant and Cardiff was not (Swansea was far more powerful, far richer) the Nazi war machine went mad to destroy our city. There are not many places outside of London that were a priority target for Hitler like Swansea was, that lunatic spent many days sending bombers to what is now SA1, SA2, SA3, SA4, SA5, SA6 and SA7. When you look at Swansea you notice a distinct lack of period style buildings compared to Cardiff, that reflects the massively more attention the Adolf Hitler gave to our city because we were producing about four times the raw materials and products that the Welsh Capital was capable of producing. With Swansea razed to the ground... literally... the city has all been destroyed from the Nazi bombing runs. Cardiff remained relatively intact and so didn't have to spend anywhere near as much to do the repairs, it effectively had scope to continue growing. But Swansea had to rebuild what had been lost and couldn't afford to spend on expanding. If Hitler had not done the bombing runs on Swansea but instead gave our city the same amount of attention as cities likes Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff and Newcastle then Swansea would be a very powerful at least for a Welsh city, more so than Cardiff is today by easy means, but it could be comparing with the likes of Bristol. Our relative industrial might led to a lot of innovations and firsts such as the Electro Magnetic Pulse (nicknamed the Death Ray by it's creator) which was funded by one of the big local copper companies, the worlds first use of a paying passenger tramline which pre-dated paying passenger trains(!!! - this was innovated by a local coal company), the Blast Furnace which directly led to the Industrial Revolution was invented by a steel worker here in Swansea and they built and successfully tested that here. Etc, etc, etc. To make people understand just how far ahead of Cardiff our Swansea was for industry back then, we had 25% of the global import and export and processing of the entire worlds copper, 10% of the import and export and processing of the entire worlds coal and 5% of worlds Iron. That is why Hitler went crazy to bring down Swansea.... and he put so much effort into it, the crazy mofo actually managed to do it.
