New Castle Street, 16 & 17, Merthyr Tydfil

Numbers sixteen and seventeen on New Castle Street, Merthyr Tydfil, stand as ordinary Post Medieval dwellings. They may have housed workers, watchers or waiting families during the noisy birth of the town. The street itself changed twice, renamed and rebuilt, yet these door numbers stayed fixed. That continuity is the strange part: everything around them turned over, but the address held steady like a nail driven through water.