4) St. Catherine's Church, Baglan - pen and ink

This was the first sketch I made using a specialist sketching pen with a very thin nib, and in retrospect I think that it's the first sketch I made where you can see what would become my urban sketching style starting to emerge. It's a very simple sketch, but it has a lovely graphic quality which the previous sketches don't. I like St. Catherine's a lot. I like a good spire, but also St' Catherine's, with it's leafy surroundings, has something of the aspect of a country church, despite being only a couple of hundred yards away from a busy junction with the M4 motorway.

St. Catherine's is built in 1875-82 is the mother church in the parish of Baglan, which lies in the Western end of Port Talbot, adjacent to Briton Ferry, which is part of the town of Neath. In the local government reorganisation of the mid 90s, Port Talbot joined with Neath and the Lliw Valley to form a Unitary Authority, a County Borough.