62) Ware House Gym

It’s fair to say that this building sits rather uncomfortably between the 1920s houses and shops on either side, and the 1990s supermarket a little further along the road. It certainly looks as if it has not been a gym, or indeed an ordinary shop all its life, and this impression is correct. Does it look all that much like a former cinema, though? Maybe when you see it from the back, and get an impression of the real size of it. This was opened in 1936, although it closed as a cinema decades before I moved to the town. I look at the building and it makes me wonder how a town the size of Port Talbot ever supported the number of cinemas it once had. To give you an idea, when I first moved in 1986, the town had one working cinema, the Plaza, one cinema about to reopen before the end of the year, the Picturedrome, one converted former cinema, the Regal (this one), and one completely derelict cinema, the Odeon. At least a couple of other former cinema buildings in Aberavon were demolished in the rebuilding of the town centre in the 1970s. I’m not certain of this, but I think that in the late 1940s, after the war, there may even have been as many as 6 cinemas working in Port Talbot. Cinema going was at an all time high at that time – television ownership didn’t really start to soar until the Coronation in the 1950s. Even so, though, 6 cinemas! I’ve never been inside the building – well, it is a gym, after all – but as an exterior it isn’t that striking. But I’m drawn to it because of the way it’s been repurposed. It’s fairly obvious if you look at my sketches and read the text that I like striking, pretty, or impressive older buildings, but I’m not so blind that I can’t see that an empty building quietly mouldering away does nobody any good. As an alternative to demolition, repurposing a building like this works for me.