What's Notable About Port Talbot: 7: Miscellaneous

 I thought I’d make this last post on the notable buildings and sites of Port Talbot a sort of round up of places I like, which don’t necessarily fit into any category, other than they’re there, and they don’t shout about what they are, yet seeing them can just brighten your day a little bit. Many of these I have sketched before, but not all of them.

So let’s start with Taibach Library. This lovely building, which houses the local library which is run by volunteers, is a Carnegie Library. What’s a Carnegie library? Well, it all goes back to Scottish American industrialist and philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie, born in Dunfermline, emigrated to the USA with his parents when he was 12, and his is a real rags to riches story. He worked hard as a very young man, and spent his money building up stocks and shares, and becoming rich in the process. Carnegie became a steel magnate, and his steel company, which he sold in 1901, would become the giant US Steel. From then on Carnegie switched his efforts from mega-scale industry to mega scale philanthropy. In particular, he funded the building of hundreds of public libraries in the USA and in the UK. This is one of them. I think it’s a lovely little building, and I don’t mind the grandeur of the face it presents to the world one little bit. I’m all for balustrades on the roof of a building like this one.

There’s a real joy to be had when you walk down what you think of as a side street, or a back street, and find something out of the ordinary which seemingly has no reason to be there. The Kash Supermarket in Bailey street is just such a building.

In terms of size and style, this is the sort of thing you wouldn’t have been surprised to see on a high street in any town, but a back street? Most of the old shops and commercial buildings in Aberavon were demolished during the 1970’s remodelling of the town centre I believe that the building was built before World War II as a Co-op originally. Incidentally, Bailey Street is so named because it stands on the location of the bailey of the medieval castle which stood there once. This also explains how nearby Castle Street got its name.

I have a thing about bridges. I make no bones about it. I like a good bridge. I’m not entirely sure that you could describe this little plate girder bridge over the River Afan as a good bridge at the moment, because it is in a state of disrepair. Thankfully, it is a grade II listed structure, so hopefully there could be some restoration work on it at some time in the future. To me, it speaks of a time when Port Talbot was an important dock town. Other than that, well, I don’t know, I just like it. It was part of a very pleasant cycle route from home to the beach.

Coming back into town, there’s the Grand Hotel. For me, it’s not a building that I would describe as conventionally beautiful, but it certainly has some presence. In days gone by, it was a bit of a dark, brooding presence. Photos from more than 100 years ago show it without it’s now familiar cream paint job, looking all dark and moody. In fact it looked just a little bit like a Victorian asylum, to be honest. Now, though, well, it looks just grand. Yes, okay, if you were in the wrong frame of mind you might end up describing it as a bit of a Victorian gothic monstrosity, but that’s far too harsh. It’s the sort of building that once a town loses, you’ll never get anything to take its place.

This next building, literally around the corner from where I live, is what used to be called the Afan Arts Centre. It’s now the Forest Veterinary Practice. I don’t know when it was built, but I’d guess it’s maybe a little older than most of Theodore Road.

I sketched this lovely building from the back, looking at it from Talbot Memorial Park, because I love the arrangement of the roof line from the back. It’s not bad from the front either. Mind you, on the same side of the road, at the other end of the street there used to be an even nicer old building, which was knocked down over 20 years so some bland and characterless flats could be built.

On either side of the main entrance to the Talbot Memorial Park in Taibach there are two rather nice little lodges. At least one of them is habitable, and it was on the rental market a few years ago. The lodges for part of the main entrance, and the main gate to which they are attached is dedicated to war hero Rupert Price Hallowes, who received the Victoria Cross in 1915. I didn’t know that, but found a website with information about the park which told me this. Most of the websites that mention the park date it to 1925, which is, I believe, when the war Memorial was first unveiled and dedicated. However, I can’t help thinking that some kind of park or gardens was here before. It’s just the style of the bandstand which makes me feel this way – it’s either Edwardian or late Victorian surely. It’s in a sorry state at the moment, but there’s enough left to convince me that you just didn’t get ornamental metalwork like that after the First World War.

For my next unexpected building, let’s head out of town, and take the top road up the Afan Valley to the community of Cymmer. Right on the main road there’s this rather grand building.

It was originally erected as parish council offices, I believe. In its last period of use it was the Bryn Siriol Senior Citizens Community Centre. It’s sad to see the building disused like this. From the roadway it doesn’t actually look to be in bad nick, but closer up you can see that the fabric of the building is deteriorating, and that’s a shame.

For more than half a dozen posts now, I’ve been picking out buildings and places that make our town notable – in a good way- and which I think are worth looking at, and worth sketching if you have the chance. So I hope I can be forgiven if I include one building that I feel stands out due to . . . well, for want of a better word, due to its ugliness. Looking for buildings that are actually ugly, as opposed to just not being very appealing, is harder than you might think. There’s a lot of blandness about – and I’m not singling out Port Talbot for this, because it’s true of a great many towns. With a bland building, the main points to make are about what they’re not, rather than what they actually are. But a genuinely ugly building shouts its ugliness in almost every fibre of its fabric. Rather like the Family Value building in Forge Road.

To me, this is one of Port Talbot’s few remaining truly brutalist buildings, and as such, I should really, really hate it. But, d’you know what? I have a sneaking regard and respect for it. I mean, I don’t actually like it, and if the town was full of buildings like this I’d probably detest it, but as a lone remnant of the architectural age that taste forgot, it’s fine. Well, I say fine – I think I really mean that it’s on the interesting side of hideous, but then that’s sometimes better than bland. Let’s start off by talking about what’s bad about this building. Flat roofs get the ball rolling. Then there’s the construction from bare concrete. If you look at the front of the building, the wall above the glass panels has these geometric designs to try to relieve the grey awfulness a little, but of course, it’s concrete, and concrete weathers badly. I do actually rather like the window panels across the front of the building above the entrance, which I think are one of the features of this building which works for me. However, why the corner above the entrance was done the way that it was, with the column extended from the ground floor to the roof of the first floor I really don’t know. There’s no need for it, and since the columns are not exactly picturesque it really doesn’t work for me. Or rather it wouldn’t, except some clever person has curved the name of the store around it. That’s a rather nifty bit of making the best of a bad job.

Those monochrome columns immediately make me think of a really grim 50s/60s department store in Ealing, West London, where I grew up. Of course, it didn’t help that Daniels, the store in question, always looked a bit of a mess to me when I was growing up.

Round the back of the building illustrates some of the problems with larger buildings from this period. There’s banks of windows, and below them the frames continue , slotted around panels. Well and good. However the materials these were built from don’t weather very well. Also, the colours that they were painted in, blues, greens and greys were pretty drab to start with. So the back of the building, which I see across Tescos car park every time I buy a paper on the way into work, is sad and depressing.

But I suppose it’s an underdog thing. The building, especially from the back, looks so forlorn, especially against the background of residential streets, and the fact it sits next to the Gothic bulk of Tabernacl Newydd, especially when compared with the cheery blandness of Tescos itself. In building terms, it’s a bit like a punch drunk old boxer, or John Cleese’s black knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail insisting it’s only a flesh wound. A building like this has no right to be doing anything other than hiding away in shame in this day and age, but the fact it’s still there at least deserves a minimum of respect from me.