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Llandarcy is a village near Neath in Neath Port Talbot county borough, southwest Wales, and formerly the site of the UK's first oil refinery. The village, which lies near the Junction 43 of the M4 Motorway, was originally designed as a garden village to house the workers for the refinery, built between 1918-22.
BP, the company operating the refinery, also operated a sports and leisure club. Following the closure of the refinery, the leisure facilities were acquired by Llandarcy Park Ltd, which redeveloped the site with a new health and fitness club, hotel and restaurant. Llandarcy now hosts the Virgin Active Health & Racquets Club (formerly known as the Glamorgan Health & Racquets Club), which has a range of indoor and outdoor sports facilities, and the Llandarcy Academy of Sport, which has one of only two indoor grass training fields in Wales.
The disused land from the scaling down of the oil refinery has found a number of new uses. Part of the site is now occupied by offices of the Environment Agency Wales. Land near the entrance of the old refinery near M4 Junction 43 has been redeveloped as a business park. All of the remaining brownfield land which was occupied by the refinery is being re-developed into a new village called Coed Darcy. The Prince's Trust is an interested party in this development, which seeks to develop the site as an "Urban Village" in the same vein as the Poundbury village project.
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