Merthyr Tydfil

Merthyr Tydfil is a town in mid Wales with a population of 55000. Legend says that the name derives from the Welsh for martyr, Merthyr, and Tydfil, a young girl who had converted to Christianity around 500 AD and was murdered by the Saxons in the town.

Surely the town's most famous person has to be the clothes and interior designer Laura Ashley. She was born here back in 1925 on the 7th September and spent her early years in the town, before being sent to London to finish her education. It was in London that she met Bernard Ashley, a worker in the City - the financial district of London, and in 1948 they got married. Laura took her husband's surname, as is done in the UK, and became Ashley instead of Mountney.

Laura started making headscarves and table napkins and sold them to a large department store called John Lewis, still today one of the biggest in Britain. Her designs were an immediate success, so much so that Bernard gave up his job in the city to work with Laura and set up a small factory to the south east of London. However, Laura was feeling homesick and so they moved the business to Wales in 1961, eventually settling in Carno. Local women worked on Laura's designs in their homes, with a driver taking and picking up the dresses in continuation. Bernard had been working on a new printing process and when he perfected it the factory could produce 5000 metres of fabric per week.

Things were going very nicely and in 1968 the first Laura Ashley shop opened, rather than selling her designs only in other stores. This South Kensington shop was soon followed by others in the west of England and again in London. Her designs had become so popular that in one of her London shops she sold 4000 dresses in just one week. In no time at all she had shops in Paris, San Francisco, Japan, Australia - all over the world. By the 1980s there were 5000 shops in total.

In 1977 the company was awarded the Queens Award for Export, and two years later it celebrated its 25th anniversary by launching a range of perfumes - again with huge success. The family were living a comfortable life - they had homes all over the world, a wonderful yacht, a private plane (which Bernard flew) and a happy family life. Laura and Bernard had four children in all, who also worked for the company in some way. However, in 1985 while she was visiting her children just 10 days after her 60th birthday, Laura fell down the stairs in her daughter's home and died after 10 days in a coma. She is buried in the churchyard of Carno.

After her death the company was floated on the London stock market in 1986 and was valued at £200 million. However, her designs soon started to become less fashionable and high production costs meant that the company made some serious losses in the late 1990s. So heavy were they that it was taken over by an Asian company and many changes were made. The focus is more now on home furnishings rather than clothes, the only part of the business that makes a profit.