Hit List 6: Former Magistrates Court

 

Today I decided to leave the churches to one side for a while – there’s plenty left, don’t worry – and sketch one of Port Talbot’s grander buildings. This is the former Magistrate’s Court, which began life as the headquarters of the Port Talbot Steel Company.

This is another of those buildings where I’ve found it difficult to find out the exact year that it was built. The closest that I’ve got is a document which lists it as ‘early 20^th century’. Well, thanks for that.

It’s in an interesting style – I suppose that ‘neo-Georgian’ would be an accurate description. Those square windows, and the ashlar-style blocks on the corner, contrasting with the red brick work certainly speak of a vernacular style owing more to the 18^th century rather than the 20^th. However it is not quite as elegant as a true Georgian building of similar size and statues would have been. It is quite impressive though.

I believe that the building had already been turned into Port Talbot Magistrates Court before I moved here in the mid-80s. The court left some time ago, and it has recently been reopened as a business hub for technology companies, I believe. Well, you know me, I’m all for re-using and repurposing old buildings where the building itself has some architectural merit.

The building sits just on the opposite side of the railway line from the station. There was a level crossing between the station and the pub which is now called the Red Lion, and this was closed off for the rebuilding of the station a few years ago. I always hoped that it would eventually be reopened, but that now looks unlikely, since the station is built and there is no sign of it being reopened. To an extent I can understand it. However carefully you build in safety features, level crossings are dangerous, because human beings do silly things from time to time, however much you try to save them from themselves. Still, it’s a shame, because if you use Harbour Way when you’re coming from the Afan Way, you have to go pretty much all the way to Margam, and then back track home to Taibach. Well, unless you use the exit onto Upper West End - which the signs make clear that you absolutely must not do unless you’re a resident.

Hit List 5: Some more Churches

 The last post I made on my hit list concerned a couple of churches. Well, let’s not forget, Port Talbot still has more churches than you can shake a stick at. So I hope I’ll be forgiven if the next few buildings on my hit list are also churches. This is Margam Road Evangelical Church. I did an internet search, but I wasn’t able to find out a great deal about it. There are some commemorative stones on the exterior of the building which were laid in 1926, so it seems reasonable to think that this is when it was built. This makes it a little bit of a Victorian Gothic revival hangover. For style wise, it’s gothic as far as I’m concerned. The windows on the front, and the buttresses certainly wouldn’t have looked out of place on a church building from pretty much any time in the previous century.

While it is fairly imposing, I can’t say that I’m in love with this building. Even at the best of times, in bright sunshine at the height of summer, it has a little bit of a dark and brooding atmosphere. It’s obviously been well kept and well looked after, but, I don’t know, when I look at a church building I’d always like to feel it lifting my spirits a bit, and I’m afraid that this one just doesn’t do that.

The next on this exclusively ecclesiastical buildings post is the Grange Street Congregational Church. Usually when I sketch a church I do it so that it at least includes a view of the entrance. But I’ll be honest, it’s difficult to get far enough away from the entrance on Grange Street to get a good photo which gets it all in – and I know because my daughter used to rent a house just opposite the church.

From this angle, then, you can see that this is a large, barn like structure. You can also see that while it’s not as ornamented as the front of the building, but you can still see a couple of gothic features, namely the arched door and the window above the side entrance, together with some of the ornamental stonework. In some ways this aspect of the building is very reminiscent of school architecture from the immediate pre first World War period, as in the nearby Dyffryn Lower school, which is hardly surprising since the church was built I the same period. It’s not necessarily the finest church in Port Talbot, but its position on the street corner makes it surprisingly imposing.

Let’s finish this particular post with a sketch of what may just possibly be the newest church in Port Talbot, the Holy Trinity Church in Sandfields. Sandfields is a large community in Port Talbot, between Aberavon, the Beach and Baglan, which was built after the second World War. The first church was in a canteen provided by Wimpey (the builders, not the fast food company of days gone by) in 1953. In 1959-60 a church was built, but this was superseded by a new building in 1969. I don’t know exactly what was wrong with it, but by the noughties it was clear that the building needed to be replaced. I’ve searched online for pictures of the 1969 building, which I remember, although I never actually went inside it, and I haven’t been able to find any.

The current building was consecrated in 2018, and I have to say, I rather like it. Normally I tend to favour the ‘more is more’ approach to ornamentation and church architecture, but to me, Holy Trinity has a very clean, harmonious appearance which seems a little Scandinavian in approach. That may just be the colour scheme, but hey, don’t knock it if it works. Out of interest, the interior looks just as effective as well, minimalist, but the clever use of white and light blue lifted my spirits, and that’s just from a photograph.  

Hit List 4: Riverside Church and Carmel Bethany Church

 Right, for this post I moved back to town. I recently made a post about churches in Port Talbot. One of the things I noted was that, especially if you include disused buildings, there are still a lot of them. I’ve drawn many of them in my time, but there are two, just behind the main road beside the car parks in the town centre, which I thought I should sketch now.

This first of the pair is the Riverside Baptist Church, although just behind it, in this sketch, you can see the roof of the other, the Carmel Bethany. Both of these churches stand on land which was cleared with the demolition of the streets behind Station Road for the redevelopment of the Town centre in the 1970s. Both of these look as if they could well have been designed by the same architect. Especially in the case of Bethany Chapel, both of these seem to follow a style of post war church architecture typified in buildings such as the Liverpool Roman Catholic Cathedral and the new Coventry Cathedral. Both of them are brown brick faced, which is all to the good, both of them have dramatic roofs, which is also good, and I also rather like the triangular topped window bays too.

If I were launch into paeans of praise for both buildings, you’d know that I was being hypocritical from the simple fact that I haven’t sketched either of them before. Once you look beneath the striking roofs, both of them are a little bit blocky and boxy, although I do appreciate the fact that they are at least brown brick boxes, and not grey brick, or, heaven forbid, concrete boxes. They don’t. in all honesty, make the heart sing in the way that a lot of church architecture from the mid 19^th century and earlier do, but they have some character, and that at the very least, is something.

Hit List 3: Reel Cinema and Bay View houses

I’m not an expert so I could well be wrong about this, but there are four buildings left in Port Talbot that I know of that either are or have been cinemas. The ones I know about are the former Plaza cinema, the Warehouse gym in Taibach, and the residential properties which used to be the Picturedrome. I’ve sketched all of these. The only one I haven’t sketched is the only one that is still a cinema, the Reel Cinema. 

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, let me state from the start that I don’t hate, or even dislike this building. As a cinema it is a perfectly functional building, and if I have a hankering to see a particular film when it comes out without waiting for DVD release, then I wouldn’t think about going anywhere else. As a building to look at as you walk past, though, it’s meh. The entrance is okay, although frankly there’s nothing particularly friendly about those large triangular bits pointing out on either side of the glazed panels. But for the most part, well, this is retail park architecture and believe me, there’s more than enough of that around as it is.

 Finishing off the buildings I felt that I should sketch around Aberavon Beach, there’s these houses which were built on the former site of the Bay View Social Club.

Now, I did actually rather like the Bay View. That’s party a matter of sentiment – when I started my quizzing career playing for the Railway Club behind the station in the late 80s, the Bay View ere our most serious competition in the old Port Talbot Quiz League, and we had a number of good matches at their place. It had just a wee bit of character about it, and it was one of the buildings that I sketched for Oxfam. But it was gutted by fire, and left empty for a couple of years before the inevitable demolition. As for the houses which have been built on the site, well, I have to say that I rather like them. I like the roofs, and the additional little roof which stretches just above the porch line. See – I’m not quite such a fussy git as I might sometimes appear. It really doesn’t take a great deal to make me happy.

That’s about it for the beach area for now. For my next post I’m going to take a look at a couple of churches that I’ve never sketched before.

The Hit List 2: Naval Social Club and the Four Winds

 Okay, so let’s recap. First building on my hit list was the RNLI Lifeboat station. This is just one of a number of buildings on or near Aberavon Beach that I could have sketched for my 100 faces of Port Talbot, but just didn't. Let’s begin with the Naval Social Club.

 First I first moved to Port Talbot in 1986, you had the Naval Club here at the Baglan end of the beach, and the RAFA Club at the Victoria Road end. The RAFA Club was in a rather lovely older building – and the Naval Social Club isn’t. When I first moved here the RAFA Club had a huge RAF roundel painted on the side. Well, the building is still there, but has moved through a couple of different guises since the RAFA moved out, leaving just the Naval club.

If you’ve been with me for any great length of time, you’ll probably be able to guess my feelings about it. It’s a 70s building, and it looks like it. To get down to specifics, it has a chunky flat roof. Bad. The upper floor is largely built from breeze blocks. Bad. These breeze blocks, incidentally, are the ornamental blocks which have cut out star shapes in them. That’s better than plain breeze blocks, for sure, but it’s still concrete. Bad. I also don’t like the lack of windows on the bottom level. Bad. Yet for all that, I have a respect for the place, partly because it’s still here. I do like the way that the window panelling looks out across the sea. It seems like common sense to have built it this way, but then common sense wasn’t always in plentiful supply in the 70s.

Moving towards the town end of the beach, on the other side of the roundabout from the lifeboat station is the Four Winds restaurant.

I haven’t actually sketched the building before, although in my recent post about public sculptures in Port Talbot I did share a sketch I made of the stature of a reclining sunbather which used to adorn part of the roof of the building.

I can’t be 100% sure of when the Four Winds was built, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it dates to within just a few years of the Naval Club. It too has its share of unlovely features. For one thing there’s that horrible chunky flat roof above the ground level. The flat roof above the upper level isn’t as chunky, but it isn’t a great deal better. There’s no bare concrete, which is good. However there is an awful lot of grey here – if you look at my sketch, basically anything with hatching or crosshatching that isn’t a window pane is grey. That’s offset to an extent by the cream paintwork on the rest.

What really saves this building, though, are a couple of features. Firstly the curve of the building at the near side. There’s very little in a 70s building that a curve can’t improve. Secondly is the way that the roof of the curved section does provide a roof patio garden, which is an attractive feature.

The Hit List 1) RNLI Station, Aberavon Beach

You know what? I really enjoyed making the last 7 posts about buildings which I think are worth seeing in Port Talbot. Over the last 3 or 4 years I’ve made a lot of sketches of places in Port Talbot, but for each of these 7 posts I ended up making at least 1 new sketch, some of them of places I’ve never sketched before. So obviously there’s still places out there I haven’t sketched. Hmm – we ought to do something about that.

Of course, I’m not saying that I’m going to sketch every building standing in Port Talbot, every house, every shop – the lot. That would be silly, and as boring for me as it would be for you. No, all I’m going to try to do over the next few weeks is try to catch up on some of those places that I’ve missed over the years, regardless of whether I think they’re good, bad or indifferent buildings. Let’s start with the beach area.

I’ve sketched quite a few of the buildings on the sea front. Some of them are still there – Francos, Remos, Aberavon Hotel and the Leisure and Fitness Centre, and some of them are gone – the Afan Lido, The Bay View, the Jersey Beach Hotel for example. So let’s start with the RNLI station.

The first lifeboat station here was built in, I think, 1966. My late father-in-law was a volunteer crewman for many years, and even after this came to an end he stayed connected with the lifeboat through making sure that the lifeboat was fuelled and other duties. In his spare time he also ran more than one local cub pack , and so when the previous station was replaced in the 1990s, he received permission to help himself to some of the paving slabs around the station, for a scout and cub hall he was rebuilding. I helped him pull up some of the stones (and my hands are still aching!) As for the new station, well, it’s rather nice isn’t it. It’s yellow brick, and that’s far more appealing than grey brick. I like the shape of it, and there are just enough windows to offset the plainness of the brick walls. Of course, the aesthetics of the building pale into insignificance when set against the function of the building. But I’m glad that I took the time to sketch it. We’d be much poorer without it.

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.

What's Notable about Port Talbot 6: Industry

 Yes, industry. Port Talbot is an industrial town, and that’s nothing we should feel ashamed about. Now, you might well be thinking, okay, but industry’s not pretty, though, is it? True, it’s not, but that doesn’t have to mean that it’s ugly, or not worth looking at.

One industry is of course indelibly associated with our town, and that’s the steel industry. And you can by all means disagree if you wish, but I think you have to consider the steel works in any reckoning about what’s notable in Port Talbot. I’ve made sketches of parts of the steelworks on a number of occasions.

The steelworks dominate the town, and the blast furnaces dominate the steelworks. Beautiful? Well, maybe not, but on the other hand, beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder. They are grand, magnificent, intricate, and an absolute joy to sketch. The play of light and shadow off all the different structures which combine in them makes them an interesting subject to draw at any time of day. Over the years I’ve become strangely fond of the appearance of the blast furnaces – whenever I’ve been away, and I first see them from the motorway, I feel that I’m nearly home.

I’ve also drawn the town’s other striking industrial structures several times. The ore cranes have a very similar appeal to the blast furnaces. They’re huge, for one thing. They’re intricate and functional for another. And more than anything else, they are a fantastic subject to sketch. I don’t think it’s going to far to call them iconic images of Port Talbot.

What's Notable About Port Talbot 5: Places of Worship

In the middle of the 20^th century, Port Talbot had an abundance of at least three types of buildings. It had an abundance of cinemas. Now there’s actually four cinema buildings left that I know of – The Regal in Taibach, which is now the Warehouse Gym, the Picturedrome which has been converted into residential properties, the Plaza which is currently being converted into a cultural hub and commercial and residential properties, and the Reel Cinema on Aberavon Beach. The Reel is a pretty typical example of out of town retail park architecture – perfectly inoffensive but with little to make the heart sing. Port Talbot also had an abundance of hotels and pubs. There’s still a lot of pubs, but when you think of what we lost in the 70s developments and later ones, you can see that we’re poorer off there than we were. Port Talbot, though, also had a lot of places of worship, and a lot of these are still there.

It’s maybe a little odd for me to write about places of worship as notable features of the town, since I don’t attend one, and my attitude to religion is probably best described as agnostic-haven’t-got-a clue-what’s-right. I’m honest enough to admit that I have nothing better to offer anyone else than what they already believe in, and I have respect for anyone who does sincerely follow any faith. But I’m interested in church and chapel architecture, and I think it does add to the appeal of a town or city.

Port Talbot can still boast a wealth of different styles of ecclesiastical architecture, as we’ll see. Still, one of the things which is fairly constant is the human scale of it. There’s very little in the area which I’d call shock and awe style church architecture. O let’s start off with one of the more bombastic – St. Theodore’s in Talbot Road.

The church, which is an example of the tail end of the Victorian Anglican Gothic revival, was consecrated in 1897, and built with financial assistance from Miss Emily Charlotte Talbot in memory of her brother Theodore – hence the dedication to Saint Theodore. It’s one of the largest churches in the town, and I think it shows some of the virtues of this particular style.

One of the sketches I sold to raise money for Oxfam is this sketch of St. Mary’s, close by the Bus station and shopping centre.

There’s been a church on this site since the end of the 12^th century, but the current building is just a little earlier than St. Theodore’s, dating from 1859, although the tower was built a little over 10 years earlier. This too is built in a gothic revival style, but while St. Theodore is like a miniature cathedral, this owes more to a country church, and is none the worse for it. I particularly like the churchyard around the church, and I tried to bring this out in the sketch.

I did say that there’s a variety of styles you can see in Port Talbot, didn’t I? 

This is Margam Abbey Parish Church. Margam Park stands on the site of a former 12^th century Cistercian Abbey. You can still see the ruins of the Chapter House in the Park.

The current Abbey Parish Church was built on the nave of the old Abbey Church. I’m not sure when it was put into its current form, but I really like the Italianate design of the façade now.

Since we’re talking about variety – how about this?

St. Peter’s 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 our old friend Miss Emily Talbot 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.

If you’re not all churched out yet, have a look at this

The darker brown building is St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church. It’s a striking building, and all the more striking in as much as it was built in 1930. You can see that it owes a little to church architecture of earlier decades. I particularly like the tower – that small roof on it makes it work for me, as does the little bit of ornamentation underneath the roof. I believe that it was built largely through the efforts of Port Talbot’s Roman Catholic community, including my wife’s grandparents.

This is St. Catherine’s in Baglan, and it’s the first successful sketch I made using an ink pen. For me, St. Catherine’s is a rather lovely building, not least because it has the best spire in Port Talbot (alright, just my opinion, feel free to disagree)

I’ve no doubt it’s not that remarkable when you compare it to other churches up and down the length and breadth of the country, but I like its unfussy quality, and the fact that it has the air of a simple country church despite being situated so close to the M4 Motorway.

I’ll single out just a couple more ‘still in use’ churches, as opposed to chapels. Way up in the Afan Valley, but still within the Borough of Neath and Port Talbot, is the village of Glyncorrwg. Glyncorrwg is the home of the rather lovely, and very striking little church of St. John. I have no dea when it was constructed and haven’t been able to find out, but I like it. This was recommended to me by a friend and fellow member of the Afan Nedd Artists’ Group who knows I love buildings, and interesting churches. I sketched it on a wet and miserable summer’s day, and it still looked this striking and interesting. I’m intrigued by the steepness of the roof considering how small the walls are, and I really like the unique bell tower.

Before we move onto churches that now serve different purposes, I’d like to to show you one of the more modern churches in the town. 

This is Sandfields Methodist Church. As you can see from the picture, it’s currently undergoing some renovation. At the apex of the roof it used to have a row of asymmetric crosses, which I rather liked, but they seem to have been removed. Now, when I tell you that the church dates from the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, you’re maybe expecting a tirade from me. Well, actually, I don’t think it’s a beautiful church. But I think it’s an interesting one. The geometric designs – the fact that a whole side of the church is all roof, mark it out as a child of its era. But at least it’s sincere. It’s not half hearted. Of course, it’s concrete, and does show some rather ugly typical concrete weathering on the slabby side of the building. But still, I do like this building, and I’d be sad to see it go.

There’s a couple of fine church buildings that are still standing, but no longer in use as churches. Let’s start with Holy Cross Church. 

Holy Cross is on a little rise, very close to the Motorway. Like St. Mary’s, I think the best views of it are through the churchyard, like this one. I believe that the building is currently home to an undertaker’s – somehow grimly appropriate, that.

This next former church was an unexpected discovery during a sketching expedition in Pontrhydyfen. This used to be the church of St. John, Pontrhydyfen, and it’s been converted into a rather lovely looking residential building. Let’s be honest, if the church had been demolished and an ordinary residential building been put up in its place, could you see a passer by ever stopping to make a sketch of it like this? Well, put it this way – if someone had, it wouldn’t have been me.

This is St. Paul’s Aberavon. I don’t know that the building itself is currently being used for anything, but in the church grounds is the St. Paul’s Centre, which is a very fine resource for the people of Aberavon. I hope that the church building itself will stay. Yes if you look at the sketch, the rear of the building, on the left, is rather unremarkable. But look at that curved and rounded front end. It’s slightly reminiscent of some of the more elegant buildings from the Conquest period in Normandy. Sorry – I’m going up myself a little there. Let’s calm down a bit.

If Port Talbot is not short on churches, then it’s certainly not short on chapels either. Which is what you’d expect, to be honest. The non-conformist tradition has always been strong in Wales, and Port Talbot is typical in the number of chapels still standing here. Let’s begin with one of my absolute favorites. 

This is the Beulah Calvinistic Methodist Chapel – commonly known as the Round Chapel. It’s actually not round at all. It is in fact octagonal. It was one building which really grabbed my attention when I first moved to Port Talbot in 1986, partly because of its unusual appearance, and even more so because it inhabits a quiet corner of a small park, minding its own business as it there’s nothing unusual about it at all.

The  chapel was constructed as part of the "planned village" of Groes, created by architect Edward Haycock, Sr. It was built by Thomas Jenkin in 1838 at the cost of £800. In 1974, the government inn their wisdom decided to demolish the village to make room for the new M4 motorway. The chapel was the only building in the village to be saved; it was re-located in 1975–76 to Margam, in an area called Tollgate Park. It was Grade II*-listed as early as 1976 as the only surviving octagonal chapel in Wales.

One of my worst early sketches – which you can see below, is the Ebenezer Chapel.

I think we should celebrate the Ebenezer Chapel because it’s the only building from this particular part of the centre of the town to have survived the redevelopment of the 1970s. Sited to one side of the Civic Centre, it’s one of those buildings you see all the time when you go into town to the shopping centre, and it’s very easy to ignore it and be blasé about it. Yet it’s a building which rewards anyone who stops to take a close look at it. There’s a lot of intricate work on the façade. I also like the almost Romanesque windows. Built in 1881, the chapel was grade II listed in 1980.

I didn’t get the perspective right when I made this sketch of the Gibeon Chapel behind the main road in Taibach, hence it looks as if it’s drunkenly leaning over.

This building replaced the mid 19^th century building in about 1910. It’s nice that it’s still in use as a chapel too, since most of the rest of chapels we’re going to look at are not in use any more.

So we come to the Dyffryn Chapel, in Ffrwdwyllt St. I don’t know if you get the scale of it from my line and wash sketch below, but this is a big impressive building – and that’s when it’s been out of use for a long time. It raises the question in my mind exactly why it was built here, in a quiet side street. 

The original building was put up in the 1840s, but the chapel’s current appearance dates from 1893. I don’t know when the chapel fell out of use, but I do know that it has had a bit of  a chequered history since. I know that there were plans for conversion into residential properties which didn’t come to fruition, although I’m not sure why. It’s a shame. It’s a lovely building, and surely that space could be put to good use. I’m not critiising the council in this – in my last post I showed that the council have been forward looking and ambitious in their recent attitude to buildings of note. Still, maybe at some time in the future?

Probably the most prominent disused chapel in Port Talbot is the Bethany Chapel on Bethany Square in the town centre. The foundation stone was laid in 1879. It’s been difficult to find out when it stopped being used as a chapel. One website I found said it was around 2000, however I myself distinctly remember going into it in about 1990 when it was the temporary town central library. After the library moved out, it’s been disused since, for the best part of 2 decades, I would guess. It was listed for public auction in the summer of 2019, but I don’t know if it was sold or not. At the moment it remains empty. I hope that eventually it will be redeveloped and used, without being demolished completely. It’s not as fancy or ornate as nearby Ebenezer Chapel, but it’s very position, on the corner of the square, slightly elevated above the roadway level and accessible by steps, make it an imposing building.

If you follow the road round from Bethany Chapel into Forge Road, you can see the last building I’m going to write about in this post. This is the Tabernacl Newydd, built in 1909. 

I believe the chapel was still in use at the turn of the Milennium. However it has been ut n the market at least once since, so I don’t believe that it is still in use. I have mixed feelings about this building. It certainly isn’t pretty. It’s unusual to see a Welsh chapel built in such a Gothic style. It’s dark and I find it a little threatening. But it is a building that you can’t ignore, and I’d hate to see it gone.

What's Notable About Port Talbot 4: New Builds

 It is easy to slag off new buildings. In fact with some of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s, it’s practically an automatic, knee jerk reaction. When you look at some of the absolute shite that was built between the start of the 60s and the end of the 80s, who can blame us for reacting that way? So, as I said, it’s easy to slag off a new building.

Last time out I wrote about and showed you some of the most recent redevelopment projects in the centre of town, where existing buildings either have already been remodelled and repurposed, or where they are in the process of this. This time, let’s talk about brand new buildings. Well, I say brand new. Actually, for my purposes, it’s anything built since the start of the 21^st century.

Now, let’s call a spade a spade. I’ve already on this very blog written about such bland, unexciting and disappointing developments as the Custom House block, and Ty’r Orsaf. Speak as you find, and I’m sorry, but that’s what I find. When I wrote about Ty’r Orsaf, I compared the lack of imagination in its design, with the slightly earlier Jubilee House in Aberavon, and I stand by that. 

It doesn’t take much in a building to feed the soul just a little. For me it’s the roof lines – it would have been so easy for a lazy designer to have covered the whole thing in one shallow pitched roof – and just a tiny bit of ornamentation, with the curved chromium balconies.

Let’s talk about the hospital.

By rights, this shouldn’t qualify as a 21^st century building. A lot of the land had already been cleared when I moved to Port Talbot in 1986, and there were continual rumours that building on the hospital was going to start any day now. These continued through the rest of the century. In all honesty, I don’t know why the actual building was delayed for so long. Whatever the case, the new hospital was opened in 2003. I think, purely as an onlooker rather than a user of the building, it’s a partial success. There is a lot of it that is long, low and rectangular, not unlike retail park architecture, if I’m honest, and not that exciting. However, even though the metal and glass opening is, to me, rather reminiscent of a large motorway service station, I rather like the bright and breezy atmosphere that it conveys. My earliest experience of hospitals was a very gloomy, threatening Edwardian edifice in West London. If you weren’t scared before you arrived at the hospital, it’s pretty sure you were when you got there. As I hinted when I was talking about Jubilee House, small things can make a difference. That curved glass canopy over the entrance is one – it would have been easy for the designer to give us something flat, or a conventionally sloped roof.

Speaking of the hospital, relatively nearby is a newer building which I like even more. This is the Port Talbot Resource Centre, where my own GP’s surgery is held, along with several other GP practices. 

I’ve criticised several developments in Port Talbot over the last couple of decades for a failure of the imagination – for playing it safe and aiming for the inoffensive factor rather than the wow factor. This building goes for it, and I’d like it for its ambition, even if I didn’t like the design.

I think you probably know me well enough to know that I think curves can add a lot to a building. In this one you haven’t just got the wide sweep of the curve to the right of the building, you’ve also got the geometric sharpness of the roof angles on the left. This is a building which has every bit as much self confidence as any brutalist monstrosity of 50 years ago. In a way, it’s a shame that this impressive building is pretty much hidden behind a typically inoffensive bland and uninteresting Morrison out of town supermarket and its car park. But then, where in town could you find the space to put up a building of this size? Hmm, I could make a suggestion or two . Having said all of that, though, it isn’t perfect. The use of different bands of rather dull colours around the curved section on the left doesn’t really hide the fact that it looks as if it’s been constructed from breeze blocks. It’s a shame, it just takes away from the finish and the effect of the building as a whole.

There are two more buildings I want to mention in this post, although I did think about whether I should, considering that I work in one of them. The Borough of Neath and Port Talbot has followed a very ambitious and forward looking programme of refurbishing, remodelling, and building brand new schools in the last decade or so. Two new schools in particular stand out, both in the Sandfields area, and actually very close to each other. The first, and slightly older, is Ysgol Bae Baglan.

The main building of YBB, as we like to call it, is a striking structure in many ways, and I have sketched it on a couple of occasions. I think it’s fair to say that you can see the same confidence in the design that you see in the Resource Centre. The main wing curves round in a wide sweep, which I’ve always though has the effect of giving the building a little grandeur without it becoming oppressive.

I like the way a broad apron sweeps around the curve of the main entrance of the building. I like the way that the roof of the main wing of the building slopes down in a graceful shallow hump – which accommodates a second floor along part of its length. There’s also a clever feature of the building that visitors wouldn’t necessarily get to see. Behind the atrium and the main entrance, there’s an open area between the smaller wing of the lower school, and the larger wing of the middle and upper school. The walls of both wings are faced with panelling in colours that have been specifically chosen to reflect the colours of the wildflowers that grow in this area of Sandfields and nearby Baglan.

It isn’t perfect. (No building is) The exterior of the school is faced with a variety of different materials, and the main building of YBB is no exception. There are areas of the school where the exterior walls are faced with some expanses of grey bricks. Well, if you’ve been with me for any real length of time, you’ll know how much I hate grey brick. Brick is a wonderful building material, but I think that grey brick is the worst possible way of using it. You might say, ah yes, but look at the carefully chosen colour scheme of the buildings – grey fits better. Well that’s your opinion, and you’re entitled to it – you may well be right. But I hate grey brick, I’m sorry to say.

Well, that’s YBB, and it’s a building which has won architectural awards, I think I should point out. Literally the other side of Seaway Parade we have the slightly newer Ysgol Bro Dur. 

Although the design of Ysgol Bro Dur is different from YBB, I think you’d be able to tell that it’s a contemporary of YBB. Unlike YBB, where I teach, I haven’t ever been up close and personal to Ysgol Bro Dur. In case you’re wondering why two such large schools have been built so close together, I should say that Ysgol Bro Dur provides education through the medium of the Welsh Language. The council has been committed to providing this in this part of the Borough, and the location makes sense as it’s accessible from Neath, Baglan, Sandfields, the Town Centre etc. What I will say is that, from the roadway at least, it does appear to be just a little more rectangular, a little more conventional than YBB. However, on the other hand, although there are places where the grey bricks are very much to the fore, there are also parts of the school built in brick-coloured bricks as well, so what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts.

Knowing YBB so well, and Bro Dur so little it’s unfair to pick a favourite. Still, I do think that both schools are worth looking at, and may, just may, be showing us the defining style of schools for the first half of the 21^st century.

Finally, let’s look at a development which has happened by Aberavon Beach. When I first arrived in Port Talbot in 1986, the largest building on the sea front was probably this one, the Afan Lido, and it looked like this:-

The Lido boasted typical Leisure Centre facilities, but most notably, an Olympic Sized swimming pool. Over the years the exterior became more funky and interesting when water slides were installed which snaked their way outside and then back inside. In 2009 the building was gutted by fire. Originally there was talk of repairing it, but the damage was too extensive and demolition began in 2011. There was some talk of building something as large and extensive in its place. Eventually though, the Council were able to open this, the new Leisure and Fitness Centre, in early 2016.

Now, I’m only interested in the look of these buildings – how they contribute to the face and image that our town presents to the world. I’m not trying to comment on how the facilities compare with the old Lido – I couldn’t even if I wanted to. Leisure, I’m all for but fitness? Nah, not so much. And I have to say, you can feel free to disagree if you like, but I like this building and I think it’s better than what was there before. Okay, so everything below the roof is the sort of thing you can see in retail parks across the length and breadth of the land. But look at the roof. It’s been designed, I think, to represent a wave, and that’s what transforms this building from something bland that you don’t mind, to something a little bit distinctive that you can actually like.

What's Notable about Port Talbot 3: Repurposing and Redeveloping Buildings

 In my last post I finished with the point about how it can be great to see buildings being repurposed, rather than knocked down and lost forever.  

Now that we’re talking about buildings that have been redeveloped and repurposed, I'd like to show you three examples of this in Port Talbot, each in a different stage of completion.  I think it’s time to introduce you to a building which is currently pigeon-holed in my mind as ‘the Glittery Turd’. I’ll explain that. When they started working on renovating this building a few years ago, I expressed my scepticism to my wife by saying,”You can’t polish a turd.” To which she replied “No, but you can roll it in glitter.” 

It really was a turd of a building before it was redeveloped too. Aberavon House, as it was then called, was built at the same time as the shopping centre, in the 1970s redevelopment of the Town Centre. To be fair, Port Talbot has never been blighted by many concrete office blocks, which I guess made Aberavon House stick out a bit. To get the full benefit – or otherwise – of its appearance, you really needed to see a photograph of how it was in colour. It had a uniformly oatmeal hue. Now, oatmeal might be acceptable as a breakfast, but on a building – no. Add to that the fact that we live in Britain, not the Mediterranean, and so concrete weathers badly. I only ever entered the building once, when my father in law was given permission to go through the vacated offices and take any furniture which might be useful for his scout troup. This was a long time ago though. It was an open plan horror, as I recall.  For a while I think there were council offices there as well. I never made a sketch of the building before they started redeveloping it – sorry, but it was just too ugly. 

The building has been redeveloped by a group called Pobl – which is Welsh for people – into 41 one or two bedroom apartments. Now, I can’t talk about how nice or otherwise the apartments are, but I can talk about the changes to the exterior of the building. For one thing, it’s white now. And let’s be honest, it does make a hell of a difference. Also, around some of the windows on the roof there’s thin highlights of primary red, yellow and other colours. It’s a relatively simple change, but one wholly for the better. The biggest change to the main shape of the building is that some of the windows have been converted, to bay windows that project out from the building a little and are longer than all the others. These are spaced at irregular intervals along the length of the building, and again, it makes a difference. It also gives the building its new name – Oriel, as in a bay window projecting out of a building. 

When you get right down to it, the building is still a big, rectangular concrete block, and I’m sorry, but I don’t fall in love with big, rectangular concrete blocks. But I will admit that this is so much better than it was.

Walking a short distance along Station Road we find the redevelopment of the old Glanafan School site. I made a sketch of this building as it was which we sold for charity in the Oxfam shop. 

In 2010 the decision was taken to amalgamate Glanafan with Sandfields Comp, Cwrt Sart in Briton Ferry, and Traethmelyn Primary School, to create Ysgol Bae Baglan. Following the opening of the new school in 2016, the former schools were demolished over the next 18 months or so. However this was a little more complicated with Glanafan. I did make this sketch of the newer blocks of the school being demolished, 

but the decision was made to preserve the façade of original school building. This sketch is what it looks like now.

I may well be wrong about this, but I heard somewhere that there were conditions made about the use of the place when the original school was built, and this may well be the reason why the original façade has been largely preserved. There’s a lot of scaffolding around it at the moment, so you have to use your imagination a bit. Looking closely, I think that it is literally only the front of the old building that remains, and everything behind the front wall is new build. Which isn’t bad going when you think of it, since it doesn’t look as if an old wall has been built around. Although I have to say, that new rectangular entrance clearly isn’t original. I’m not 100% sure how I feel about the entrance, but then that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I should imagine that the residential properties built behind this main building will go well, but I do have to say I wonder how the commercial units in this part of the development will do. After all, it’s not as if businesses have exactly been hammering down the doors of Ty’r Orsaf or the Custom House commercial units a little way down the road. If you build it, will they come? Time will tell. 

For all that, though, it’s nice to see something of the town’s architectural heritage being incorporated into a new development like this, rather than just thrown on the architectural scrap heap like so much of the town’s heritage was in the last few decades of the 20^th century.

 

Let me finish this post with the Plaza Cinema. I’ve drawn the building several times, and painted it once. 

Now, had the Plaza fallen out of use in the 1970s, then I’m pretty sure it would have gone the same way as most of the town’s other cinemas, and once upon a time Port Talbot had a lot of them. Even as relatively recently as the 1990s the lovely Majestic Cinema was demolished to make way for a Tesco development. Now, being realistic, after it closed for the last time in 1999, it was always unlikely that the building was ever going to open as a cinema again. The council bought the building a few years ago, and in the last two months they have started work on it, to transform it into a ‘community hub’ whose facilities will include a café, gym, offices, a hall, a conference area, and a digital recording studio. Good show.

We’re not there yet, as you can see from this sketch I made today. But at least it clearly shows that while most of the building has already been demolished, at least the wonderful façade is being preserved to be incorporated into the new building. Quite right too. You’ll have to go a long way before you see a better one.