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There’s a sense of melancholy when I ask Llanelli businessman David Craddock how he has seen his town change over the decades.

“It’s difficult to think back to what Llanelli was really like so many years ago. It’s completely different now to what it was,” he says. “I wish I could go back 45 years and appreciate everything we had.”

Mr Craddock, who is a director at estate agents’ Davies Craddock on John Street in the town centre, has been a self-employed businessman in Llanelli for 45 years and has watched first hand its economic decline.

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“Perhaps we could have worked harder as a town in keeping some of the industry alive?” he says. “Perhaps there’s been mistakes by government and local authority? It’s easy to point the finger and say, ‘You should have done more’, but at the time, was that possible?”

Ron Jones, founder and executive chair of Llanelli-headquartered television giant Tinopolis, shares Mr Craddock’s view but says Llanelli is no different to any other post-industrial town in Wales.

“The structural problems that Llanelli faces are significantly outside of its control,” says Mr Jones. “The big tin and Duport steelworks disappeared all those years ago and once you take away the massive impact of coal and steel across the coastal strip, you take away the integrity of the industrial heartland. Llanelli’s no different to Maesteg, Tredegar, or Ebbw Vale. They all suffer from the same thing,” he adds.

It’s true. Llanelli’s decline has followed many other Welsh post-industrial towns struggling to find a trade or economic activity big enough to replace the huge traditional industries they have lost. Yet, Llanelli has, arguably, experienced the biggest economic decline out of all towns in Wales.