Remembering the Mumbles Mile

When I first came to Swansea in 1978 to attend university the legend that was Mumbles was on everybody's lips, and in particular the infamous Mumbles Mile. As this article in Wales-on-Line says, for a lot of people of a certain age, the Mumbles Mile was a legendary night out.

The idea was to walk for a mile and drink a pint in each of the ten pubs on the mile before ending up in Cinderellas' night club:

The Swansea seafront pub crawl was a long-standing tradition, a coming-of-age ritual, and a rite of passage which was not for the faint-hearted.

If you were celebrating a special birthday — or anything else, for that matter — you'd gather up the gang and set off to conquer the famous (infamous?) drinking challenge.

Many fell by the wayside as they attempted to slurp their way from The White Rose on the corner of Newton Road to the Holy Grails at the end of the alcohol-fuelled endurance test, the twin nightclubs of Cinderella's and Neptunes.

But times have changed, the drinking culture has changed, and in 2018, the practice has all but disappeared.

In fact, many of the pubs have fallen by the wayside and, as the website says, technically, the run wasn't actually a mile long:

And way back in the good old days, when there were around 26 pubs to visit, even the most hardened of drinkers would probably opt for half a pint at each stop.

But what began as an occasional night out for the people of Swansea spiralled out of control.

A victim of its own success, it attracted increasingly larger groups including stag dos and hen parties, who were accused of being considerably rowdier than the smaller groups who had established the trend.

This was, unsurprisingly, met with stern opposition from some in the local community.

Things really came to a head when 24-hour drinking laws came into practice. The pubs could open later, which meant more drinking and, as a result, more antisocial behaviour.

Some hotels stopped taking single-sex bookings, and in 2001, Cinderella’s banned stag parties after a series of “violent, drink-fuelled incidents.”

Meanwhile, at the other end of town, Wind Street was slowly but surely establishing itself as the city's new number one drinking hotspot.

What was meant to be a cultured cafe quarter had instead spawned Swansea's party central, and revellers who might once have headed to Mumbles for a good time flocked to the city's up-and-coming place-to-be instead.

The knock-on effect meant less drinkers, and with it less pubs and clubs, and the Mumbles Mile's heyday was well and truly over.