It was the longest pub crawl of my life – visiting numerous boozers across 250 miles over ten days – in homage to one of Britain’s most infamous drinkers, Dylan Thomas. I’m not, I must qualify, a Thomas obsessive, as this enterprise might suggest. If exposed to Thomas at length, I find myself recalling Private Eye’s 1980s characterisation of Neil Kinnock: ‘The Welsh windbag.’ Although, in fairness, even Thomas himself described his own verse as ‘a steaming pile of Welsh whimsy’.  

We start in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace, which he described as an ‘ugly lovely town’ – something locals have since adapted to the earthier ‘pretty shitty city’. The first stop had to be the Uplands Tavern. This pub is around the corner from Cwmdonkin Drive, the suburban terrace where Thomas was born in the front room of number 5 in October 1914. He was still living there when he left school at 17 and became a trainee reporter on the South Wales Post – and a regular at the Uplands Tavern.    

Much of Swansea was destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs. Thomas himself once watched a pub burn to the ground during the Blitz. And Thomas pops up all over the patchily rebuilt city, including........

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