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The Swansea end of the bay has the marina, the market and the streets behind them. Wind Street is where the bars and restaurants are, and it fills up in the evening. The sand is a couple of minutes from the shops, which is not true of many city centres in Britain.

Go the other way and the Gower begins. Reynoldston sits under the long ridge of Cefn Bryn, and Parkmill is where the valley drops away towards Three Cliffs Bay. Oxwich and Port Eynon are twenty minutes further west along the south coast.

Swansea smelted copper on a scale nowhere else matched. It had the coal, a sheltered river mouth and a short crossing to the Cornish mines, so the ore came to the fuel rather than the other way round.

The works at Hafod, started by a Cornishman called John Vivian, grew into the largest copper works in the world, with more than a thousand men on it. Hafod and Morfa merged and kept going until 1980, when the last of it shut. Penderyn now runs a whisky distillery in the old power house.

There is also a set of paintings in the Guildhall that London turned down. Frank Brangwyn was asked to fill a hall in the House of Lords with panels remembering the dead of the First World War. He painted birds, fruit and jungle instead of battles.

The Lords said it was far too cheerful and refused the lot. Swansea took all sixteen, and raised the ceiling of its new assembly hall past forty feet so they would fit. The room carries his name to this day.

The Brangwyn Hall is a working concert venue rather than a museum, and the Guildhall around it is under refurbishment. You can still see the panels, but ring Swansea Council first, because access depends on what is on that week.

Oxwich is the easy beach from the city, a long shallow bay you can park beside. Rhossili is the opposite: three miles of sand under a bare green hill, with the Atlantic coming straight in and nobody watching the swimmers at any point in the year.

If you want somebody keeping an eye out, Langland and Caswell are patrolled from early May to mid-September, and Port Eynon for around nine weeks from July. Oxwich and Three Cliffs get no patrol either, so look for the red and yellow flags before you swim. Langland, Caswell, Port Eynon and Rhossili are all rated excellent for bathing water quality.

In the evening most people end up on Wind Street. Down at the marina you can eat outside by the boats, and the whole lot sits close enough together to walk between. Oystermouth Castle above Mumbles opens daily through the season, and you can cross a glass bridge high inside the ruin.