97) J.D.Wetherspoons Lord Caradoc

An impulse sketch this one. Two of my daughters told me that they were taking my grandchildren out to breakfast at Wetherspoons, and would I like to come. On a whim I took the A4 sketchbook with me, and I made this sketch of the interior of the bar/restaurant while the nippers were chowing down. I think my daughters were a little put out that I was concentrating on the sketch so much, consider my wrists duly slapped. As for the name of the bar, well Caradoc ap Iestyn was reputedly the first Lord of Fan, who built the original motte and bailey castle, commemorated in the names of nearby Bailey Street and Castle Street. 

96) McDonalds Aberavon

Yes, friends, if we're trying to show Port Talbot - and indeed any UK town of any size - in all of its many faces, then we cannot ignore fast food, in this case McDonalds, the daddy of them all. I'm old enough to remember the first McDonalds opening in the UK in the mid 70s - believe me, before that burger bars in the UK were a disgrace to the name, and I arrived in Port Talbot quite a long time before McDonalds did. I know that a lot of people dislike McDonalds because they are a symbol of the corporate world which is robbing towns of their individuality. Thing is though, if people didn't like it, then it wouldn't be here, and if it IS here, then it's fair game for a sketcher.

95) Aberavon Bridge and River Afan

I sketched the canopy of this bridge and the Tesco store to the left of it before - 

Number 59) Town Centre Stone Bridge Canoy and Tesco

However I wanted to make a sketch where the bridge itself was featured more clearly. The stone bridge is a grade II listed building, and makes the link between the shops in Station Road, and the Aberavon shopping centre and the Civic Centre/Princess Royal Theatre. 

94) Garage behind Talbot Road

Over the years I've had a number of second hand cars - in fact my current car is the first ever one I've been able to buy new. So much for teachers' exorbitant salaries, eh? Over the years my wife and I have had to adopt a 'make do and mend' attitude to keep a succession of used cars going for as many years as possible, and this particular garage has been a godsend. It's a little bit of a hidden gem, since it's situated in a back alley between a main road, and the main railway line. 

93) Footbridge along the Afan, between Velindre and Cwmavon

A little further down the path which runs between Ynys y Gored and the river, you come to this metal footbridge. I have seen anglers fishing from the bridge, and from the sides, but none were there when I made this sketch. In the summer it can be a very pleasant walk along the path as far as Cwmavon, although a few days of rain can render it very muddy. When my children were young, I used to take them just past the bridge where there was the most fantastic place for skimming stones across the river – not when anyone was fishing, mind you.

92) Ynys Y Gored - The House on the Hill

Here’s a question for you. Which is the oldest house in this picture? Answer – the one on the hill. I’ll come back to that in a minute. The other houses were built on what used to be the depot of Scott’s the builders. It’s a good location, right by the River Afan, and the houses themselves look very pleasant – far nicer than Scott’s yard used to be. I used to live in Velindre, and I fancy these were being built when we moved away to another part of town. As for the house on the hill, well that was there when I arrived in 1986. In fact, judging by the architectural style, I’d say it was probably built in the late 60s or the 70s. My wife and I nicknamed it Tracy Island after the very similar house on the eponymous island in Thunderbirds. The kids had no idea what we meant. . . until the Thunderbirds revival in the 90s, that is.

91) Masonic Hall, Forge Road

People can get a bit funny about the Freemasons. I'm not a member, and am unlikely to ever be invited to become one, but that doesn't mean that I have any axe to grind about what is, I honestly believe, first and foremost a charity organisation. As for the hall itself, it's on the NPT register of listed buildings, and is Grade II listed. That's about all I could find out about it. A website suggests that it was built between the two world wars, and looking at the architecture I'd concur with that, although would suggest the 20s rather than the 30s. There was an extra pleasure making this line and wash sketch, since I made it on the first day of the summer holidays from the school in which I teach. 

90) Apple Green Petrol Station Renovation, Talbot Road

For most of the time I’ve lived in Port Talbot, this petrol station was under the Texaco branding, and frankly, the only thing you could say about it was that it was convenient, especially after we moved to live in Talbot Road ourselves. Cheap, it was not – in fact let’s call a spade a spade, I think it was amongst the most expensive fuel in town, and I’ve no idea how it kept going as long as it did. Then it was taken over by Applegreen, a UK based chain of petrol stations, and suddenly the prices became a lot more competitive. So much so that I even started buying my morning paper there, just as a way of showing support. Currently the station is being rebuilt to  include a Subway takeaway.

89) Bar Gallois, Aberavon

Almost 30 years ago I made my first tentative steps in the world of quizzing. My talent was spotted and I was invited to play in a team in the Port Talbot Quiz League. It was after the league and Cup grand finals in the Jersey Beach Hotel - since demolished - that our triumphant team adjourned to this very pub. In those days it was called the High Tide. This was a Friday evening, and it really was my first ever experience of what I believe is commonly known as a 'grab-a-granny' night. That was an experience.

Well, since then the Bar Gallois has changed hands, changed names, and gone upmarket, and it's a very popular fixture on the local restaurant circuit. 

88) Leisure and Fitness Centre

This £13 million facility opened on the Aberavon seafront in January 2016. Essentially, it was built as a replacement for the Afan Lido Leisure centre, which burned down in 2009, and was demolished in 2011. The Council always promised to replace the Lido, even though this credit crunch, Granted, the old Lido had a full size pool, whereas the new Leisure centre only has a 25m pool. Having said that it is, to my mind, a far more appealing looking building, and it has an impressive range of facilities, and seems to be very popular, judging by the full car park at 8am on a Friday morning. 

87) Slow Train to Swansea

OK - strictly speaking I really didn't need to do another picture of Port Talbot Parkway train station. This one makes the cut, though, because it's a line and wash, which I made with my little travelling watercolour set of a mere 8 colour pans. 

When I first moved here there was literally just the one station - Neath - between Port Talbot and Swansea. Since then though a couple of smaller stations have been opened between Port Talbot and Neath - Baglan and Briton Ferry, and they are served by little single carriage jobs like this one. 

86) St. John The Baptist Church, Glyncorrwg

Glyncorrwg is a small community in the valley of the River Corrwg, quite close to  Cymmer. Up until the 1970s it was very much a coal mining community, but since the decline of the industry, and a lot of people left the area to seek work elsewhere. Since the 1990s when the local community decided to take advantage of the local scenery and complemented it with a series of ponds along the narrow valley, and there’s a growing leisure industry based around mountain biking, canoeing and fishing.

As for St. John the Baptist, well, I haven’t been able to find out when the current church was built, but there’s been a church in the community for centuries. One suggestion for the derivation o the name Glyncorrwg suggests that it may be derived from St. Curig.

I like this building, and I was surprised to learn that it isn’t a listed building at all.

85) Barclay's bank building, Station Road

Yes, dearly beloved, we are back at Station Road again, and back sketching striking buildings again. I will admit that I have painted this Barclay’s Bank building in acrylic in the past. I like this. I like it because it’s a remnant, a reminder of what town High Streets used to look like when I was growing up. If you removed all of the signage, then asked people to guess what kind of commercial premises it was, I bet that most of them would tell you that it’s a bank. The whole thing was doubtless designed to give an air of safety and security, which you can see in the Victorian gothic styling, with those huge masonry window frames etc. When these buildings are all gone – which will happen one day, there will be nothing comparable to them built, and we will all be the poorer for it.

84) Tata Steel Sports Club, Margam

The club has gone under a series of different names, as ownership of the steelworks has changed hands, from the Steel Company of Wales, to British Steel, to Corus, to Tata Steel. I can’t really say how much, if any, connection exists now between the club itself and the steelworks – I know for example that Tata Steel RFC are completely financially independent from the works. This shows the clubhouse, and to be honest it has seen better days. Speaking of the Rugby Club, this has been a great ‘nursery’ club for younger players, a number of whom have even gone on to play for Wales later on in their careers.

83) Port Talbot Hospital

I remember that there was talk of a new hospital being built on Baglan Moors when my oldest daughter was born in the old Neath Hospital in 1986. Finally, 17 years later, the hospital opened, in 2003. If I'm totally honest with you, the architecture did, and still does remind me of a motorway service station - come to think of it so does the inside - only on a rather larger scale. I don't mean to be horrible. As a building I find it totally inoffensive, and if the worst you can say about it is that it is a little generic, at least it's not a totally characterless box. 

82) Royal Oak Pub, Bryn

Bryn is a small community, situated in the Llynfi Valley, just before the border between Port Talbot and the county of Bridgend. Bryn means hill, and that makes it a very appropriate name for the place. In the course of playing in the Bridgend Quiz League, at least once a year I've driven from Port Talbot to Maesteg, which means passing through Bryn. Apart from the lovely rounded end of the pub, the really intriguing thing about it is that if you come from Maesteg, it's at the bottom of a long, open downhill road, and this large pub seemingly sits in the middle of nowhere with nothing around it. Of course there are houses hidden behind it and just down the road around the bend, but even so it's a striking sight. 

81) The 11:49 to London Paddington, Port Talbot Parkway Station

Since 1991, when I passed my driving test, I've always driven back to London and to my family in England, rather than using the train. With a car full of kids it was always a hell of a lot cheaper than the train. Still, for the first several years I lived in Port Talbot the train was very much the preferred option over the National Express coach. It's a funny thing that this is towards the Swansea end of the same stretch of line on which I used to spot trains near West Ealing station, a couple of miles outside the London Paddington Terminal. 

There's been a station here since 1850. In 1984, a couple of years before I first came to Port Talbot, it was renamed Port Talbot Parkway, largely because it had acquired a large car park. A large and very expensive car park, I might add, which I have never seen with more than a very few cars in it. 

80) British Lion Pub, Cwmavon

I really have no other reason to include this one - other than that it is a nice looking building too - other than the only time I have ever been in it was to play in a quiz, more than 2 decades ago. My team and I were well beaten, where we actually expected to win. From which I learned a valuable lesson - if you can't deal with losing in a quiz, then learn a lot of stuff and become a better quizzer. This is one of the last buildings before Cwmavon melts into Pontrhydyfen. 

79) Duffryn Rhondda Post Office

Duffryn Rhondda is a small community in the Afan Valley, between Pontrhydyfen and Cymmer. There's not a lot to see of it from the main Afan Road, apart from this rather impressive post office and convenience store. It has a magnificent backdrop with the forested hills, against which its freshly painted white walls stand out proudly. 

78) Franco's Restaurant, Aberavon Beach

Franco's began as a basic chip shop in a glorified hut on the prom in Aberavon Beach. The owners ploughed their money back into the business, and then built a purpose built modern chip shop, which forms the right hand part of the building. A couple of years ago they ploughed more money back into the business to create the restaurant which is now the left hand part of the building. Is it popular? Well, judge for yourself from the queue - this was admittedly a sunny July Sunday lunchtime. 

77) M4 Motorway

The M4 Motorway runs on a raised section right through the town. As you can see from the sketch - and I made this one on a Sunday afternoon, hence the lack of traffic - from Margam right through the town the M4 only has two lanes on each carriageway. It's fair to say that this causes a LOT of congestion, and for a while a couple of years ago a couple of junctions leading to and from the town on the Motorway were actually closed at peak time. Didn't seem to work. 

When I first moved here, Port Talbot was the place where the M4 suddenly and abruptly ended, to begin again a couple of miles west of the town. The linking section was finally opened in the mid 1990s. 

76) Gibeon Congregational Church, Taibach

I found this building while I was looking at the former Picturedrome Cinema (Number 71) Former Picturedrome Cinema, Taibach).

To be fair, Port Talbot is not short of a choice of places of worship, but of the older ones, this is one of the best looked after – well, judging by the exterior, anyway. Sometimes you start to research the places that you’ve sketched and it’s relatively easy to find basic details about when it was  built, and any significant happenings involving it. Then other times you just end up drawing a blank, as I did with the Gibeon. I used this sketch for a demonstration of method that beginners could use to construct a sketch of a building, which is why you might notice pencil lines on this one. Normally I don’t use pencil at all when I make a sketch now.

75) Margam Abbey Chapter House

Well, look, I know that I already sketched quite a similar subject(Number 65) Margam Abbey Ruins and Margam Castle) I have to justify it to myself for two reasons. That particular sketch wasn't a real study of the ruins as such, they may have been in the foreground, but it was more a case of making one part of a frame for Margam Castle and steps in the distance. The other reason is that it's another attempt at line and wash, and in some ways I quite like it, I think it's got enough for me to be able to tell myself that I'm making a little progress with line and wash. 

74) Pontrhydyfen Aqueduct

This is the other piece of monumental engineering for which Pontrhydyfen is justly famous. While it doesn’t have as many arches as the old railway viaduct (Number 66) Pontrhydyfen Viaduct)Pontrhydyfen Viaduct) and it’s a mottled grey, which I find less appealing than the viaduct’s red brick, this structure really bestrides the village. Add to that the fact that it’s an aqueduct, and you’ve got a very imposing and interesting structure. Researching this post I found a post written in the mid 80s for the schools’ Domesday Project – which explained that it was

“built in 1825 to supply water to the Blast Furnaces in Oakwood. It has 4 arches,is 459ft in length,75ft in height and 14ft wide. The bridge cost £16,000 pounds to build. Now it is used for cars and pedestrians. In February 1985 cracks were discovered on the Aqueduct and it was closed, thus cutting off a pedestrian access to Oakwood.”

I didn’t know that cars were ever allowed across – it is very narrow, and I wouldn’t have enjoyed driving across it. I’m delighted to say that the aqueduct seems pretty secure now, and I’ve walked across it many times.

73) Swansea - London Mile Post, Margam

This mile post was installed in the 19th century when the main Swansea to London Road, now known as the A48, was made into a turnpike. This one just stands by a bus stop, near the corner of the road, minding its own business. It’s one of several still standing, each of which has been grade II listed. I used to think that they were carved stone, but actually this is not the case, since they were all made of cast iron. You can actually find one in the open air Museum of Welsh Life just outside Cardiff. On a personal note, I moved from London in 1986, and although I’m perfectly happy to be living in Port Talbot now, for quite a long time this post did serve as a reminder of just how far away my ‘home’ was. I’ve always liked the look of it though.

72) Concrete Penguins, Aberavon Beach

These concrete penguins, another set of concrete penguins a few feet away, and an adjacent concrete Blue Whale are well known, and now, well loved landmarks on Aberavon Beach. In bygone days the beach was home to a funfair, trampolines and a boating lake, but all of them were removed by the end of the 70s. The concrete penguins and whale were built in the mid 80s, just before I moved to the town in 1986. Now, don’t get me wrong, once you’ve clambered all over it there’s not a lot you can do with a concrete whale, and less you can do with a concrete penguin. Nonetheless, when the council announced plans to demolish them all to make a car park, there was something of an outcry, especially from local children, and the plan was cancelled. Having said that, there were a further set of penguins about half a mile along the prom, and they were removed, but then those ones were in a terrible state.

71) Former Picturedrome CInema, Taibach

Similar to the Ware House gym (Number 62) Ware House Gym) – this unassuming residential block was once one of Port Talbot’s many cinemas. Unlike the Ware House Gym, though, you’d never have known this to look at it. I’m not surprised that the Picturedrome closed. The surprising thing is that it ever opened in the first place. For one thing it is stuck away in a back street. For another thing, although it looks like a decent size in this picture – and as a residential block it is – frankly, as a cinema I found it small. Yes, I found it so, since although it closed in 1984, it opened again in December 1986, after I’d moved to the town. Of all of the town’s cinemas it probably had the reputation of being the bargain basement version. After all, it’s nickname was ‘the cach’. Now, you don’t need a GCSE in Welsh to figure out that this means something brown and steaming which comes out of Cowes – and I’m not talking about the Isle of Wight Ferry. I did actually see a couple of films – “The Name of the Rose” and “Little Shop of Horrors” – and it didn’t seem particularly unhygienic to me, but whatever the case, it only lasted a year or two before closing again, and within a few years had been converted into a nursing home. 

70) Watching the Lions v. All Blacks - Twelve Knights pub, Margam

I sketched this surreptitiously during the second test between the British Lions and the All Blacks, in the Twelve Knights Pub in Margam. This is only one small part of  large pub restaurant. If you're wondering whence it derives the name, there was a legend which persisted up until the 19th century that Robert Fitzhamon, a Norman follower of William I, conquered the whole of Glamorgan with just 12 knight followers. Fitzhamon existed, and most of the knights ascribed to him also definitely existed. However the legend is just that, a legend, with little or no literal truth behind it. 

69) St. Peter's 'Iron' Church, Goytre

There are several things about St. Peter’s, Goytre, which make it an easy choice for me to sketch as one of my 100 faces of Port Talbot. For one thing, it is the only public building of any kind in Goytre. Goytre is a small community about a mile inland from the centre of Port Talbot. For another thing it was actually moved from where it stood previously in Morfa, when Miss Emily Talbot, whose largesse to the people of Port Talbot has already been mentioned in connection with other buildings in the 100, paid to have it re-erected in Goytre, concerned that there was no place of worship in Goytre itself. The main reason, though, is that the walls of the church are constructed from galvanised metal, which somehow seems remarkably appropriate, bearing in mind the importance of the steel industry to the development of the town. The church, opened on this site in 1915, was renovated in the early years of the 21st century, and reopened in 2003. When I made this sketch it was looking a bit tatty and a bit sorry for itself. Shame.

68) Outside the Somerset Arms on a sunny Sunday Evening

I thought long and hard about how whether to sketch much of the pub itself, but decided on reflection that the pub really isn’t the story, while the people are. Which is not to say that the Somerset Arms itself isn’t worth sketching, since it is. But the story is basically that on any sunny Sunday early evening both this, and the forecourt of the Old Surgery on the other side of the main road, are full of life, full of people. I felt more drawn to the Somerset because the Old Surgery at the time was full of a much younger crowd, and I felt more comfortable sketching people of a comparable vintage to myself.

67) The Refresh - former Cymmer Railway Station

This building is both another connection with railways, and also another example of a good building being repurposed. Like the former Cynonville Station (Number 45 of my 100 Faces of Port Talbot - Former Cynonville Station) Cymmer Station was closed, and the tracks ripped up. Several miles along the same cycle track that passes through Cynonville, the Station found a new lease of life as the “Refresh”, short for the Refreshment Rooms. It’s a great place, and I’m particularly fond of it since twenty years ago, my father in law and I used to run from the car park in Pontrhydyfen all the way to Cymmer, and the Refresh was always a welcome sign that we’d be turning round and heading back, and the incline is very gently downhill on the way back. 

With this photo I had to ‘cheat’ a bit to make the sketch from the vantage point I wanted. From the main road to Port Talbot, you get a view down to the Refresh, but it’s so far away that I couldn’t see it well enough to make the sketch. So I took a photo using the zoom lens of my camera, and the sketch is based on the photo that I took.

66) Pontrhydyfen Viaduct

Some villages have all the luck. Pontrhydyfen isn’t very big, but it is one of my favourite corners of Port Talbot. Most people who have heard of the village could tell you that it’s the birthplace of Richard Burton – true – and some could even tell you that it’s also the birthplace of Ivor ‘Zulu’ Emmanuel. While I respect this, it’s not the reason why I like it so much. The main reasons are two large scale pieces of civil engineering, the Aqueduct, and this Viaduct. The single track railway line which used to cross its ten arches was still working when I was born in 1964, but only just, closing for good in December of that year. As it should be, it is Grade II listed, and I’ve taken many pleasant walks across it in my time.

65) Margam Abbey Ruins and Margam Castle

The building on the left is the ruined Chapter House of the medieval Margam Abbey, a Cistercian Abbey originally founded in 1147.  It’s very possible that there was a much older monastic community on the same site, or close by, since early Celtic stone crosses have been found on the site, and they are on display in the nearby Margam Stones Museum. In the background, the large building is Margam Castle, a 19th century gothic confection that I’ve sketched before. The view looking up the steps towards the castle is actually one of my favourite views in the whole of Port Talbot. I managed to get the figure in when she stopped for a minute, to have a breather, I think. It was a beautiful bright day sketching this, but there was a cold wind blowing, and the bench I sat on to make this sketch was in the shade. I know that we can get 4 seasons in one day in Britain, but come on, shivering in July?!

64) Checkouts in Aldi, Taibach

I wanted to sketch this one because it illustrates a change which has happened in terms of shopping in Port Talbot. When I first moved here, Tescos was the only ‘big’ supermarket in town. Yes, there was a Coop Pioneer store in Sandfields, but that was a bus ride away. When Tesco built their new store in the 1990s, they were really the only game in town. However, a significant proportion of that game has been taken away by an Aldi store which opened in Taibach a few years ago. I just wanted to make a sketch which illustrated the place, and also gave a hint about the basic problem with Aldi – people buy trolleys full of stuff, and despite the multiple lanes of tills, only one or at most two are ever open. Cuts down costs, I suppose.