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.

What's Notable About Port Talbot 2) Public Transport

 

Here’s one way of getting a first inkling about the view a town or city has of itself – take a good look at the places where you arrive in the place, and where you depart from.

So let’s start with the bus station. The first time I ever came to Port Talbot, in the summer of 1985, to meet my girlfriend’s (later to be my wife) parents, and then to head off with her to the Gower for a week’s camping, I got off the National Express Bus in the bus station here.

As with much of Port Talbot since the War, the building gives us the choice of either looking at the glass half full or half empty. Taking the latter, well, there’s not a lot of ‘there’ there. If you look on the picture which was sketched in 2017, you can see that there’s a series of metal canopy roofs, which stretch between concrete columns and a large brick faced concrete wall. The windows and doors within each bay have all been placed there since I arrived in town, during the 1990s, and were a very welcome addition. I learned to drive in 1991, but prior to that I would take the bus to Briton Ferry to work, and believe me, on a winter’s day this was a very bleak and inhospitable place. Even now it’s not that much to look at, but at least it always did the job well, compared to a lot of municipal bus stations of my own experience. In fact the only thing which really didn’t work about it was that it’s a five minute walk or so to the train station. This is because it was built tacked onto the shopping centre, during the remodelling of the town centre in the 1970s.

Now, taking that point about the distance from the train station, a few years ago a new bus station was built literally just outside the train station. Ah – thought we of the town – that makes sense. Now you can get off your train, with full shopping bags, or suitcases, or whatever, and get straight on a bus to take you to wherever you live in the town. Jolly good show.- Well, the reality is that that’s not what the new bus station turned out to be for.

As I understand – and if I have this wrong, then I apologise – the new bus station was built with European redevelopment fund money, with the idea being to create a new transport hub. So, basically, the new station is not meant for local buses, but for buses going to Cardiff, Swansea and further afield.

As I said, apologies if I have this wrong. However, as I understand it there’s a basic fallacy here. It seems to me that it has been built on what was once a roundabout between the railway station and the police station, in order that people can come out of the station, and then get on a bus to another town. WHY? If you’re in, let’s say Swansea, why the hell would you get off the train at Port Talbot to get on a bus to Cardiff, when you might just as well take the train? Or vice versa from Cardiff. I admit I may well be missing something here, but I just don’t get it.

This is just based on my own casual observation, but I never see more than 1 bus in there, and that’s rare, and I very rarely see anyone waiting.

Well, moving on, while the new bus station was being built, the railway station was being rebuilt. I never sketched the previous station building– mainly because it was an unprepossessing job, with brick facing probably on a concrete structure, and a bleak and windy enclosed footbridge to the platforms. In 2012 the whole thing was rebuilt into this:-

I made the sketch in 2017 when the station had been opened, but the new bus station was still being built. I’m afraid that I strongly dislike this building. It’s not so much the shape of it – although it is too blocky for my liking. Still, in a clearly monochrome sketch it doesn’t look too bad. It looks far more dramatic than what was there before, for example. However, when you look at it in real life colour though. . . We are a town who often get spoken off as a grey industrial town. So why the hell did anyone in their right mind say – okay – first building many people are going to see when they arrive in town? Well its obvious, isn’t it, grey metal panels and grey bricks all round!- Yes, okay, there are coloured panels on the side and around the top of the rectangular tower, but even then the colours are very washed out pastel. It’s not even as if it’s a case of bad outside, but good inside. No. Inside the new station, until you get onto the platforms, it’s pretty foul. Grey, bare walls. I know that this marks me down as the kind of person who automatically says about any new building – I didn’t like what was there before, but I HATE what’s replaced it. What I really hate about this building, though, is the fact that it seems as if we have learned so little since the dark days of the 1970s.

I mean compare the station with the signal box, which I sketched a couple of years ago:-

This signal box was originally built in 1962, which was before steam was phased out on British Railways. Now, I should think it’s had quite a bit of work done on it since it was first built, and when I sketched this in 2017 it had, as you can see, a lot of scaffolding around it. But being honest, can we actually say it’s that much worse than the current station? I don’t think so. It has brown brick facing for one thing. The windows at least break up the surfaces of the blank walls, and the uncovered staircases are more appealing, and probably a lot better to use than the covered ones of the station footbridge. Well, by all means dismiss my opinion as that of an uninformed grumpy old git, but personally I think that we, as a town, should be aiming a little higher than being about as appealing as a 1960s signal box.

Once upon a time, there were a lot more railways running through Port Talbot. Using a photograph, I made this sketch of the Aberavon Seaside Station, which was closed before I was born in about 1959.

Now, the reason why I include this is that in the background, to the right of the gasometer, you can see a bridge. This carried Victoria Road over the railway, and was called Beach Hill, and very much a local landmark. When the tracks were taken up, the trackbed was converted into a roadway called the Afan Way. It made sense to demolish Beach Hill, and make a crossroads intersection between the Afan Way and Victoria Road, but there was a lot of opposition to it in the town, and it didn’t happen until decades after the Afan Way was first opened.

I made this sketch in 2017, of where Beach Hill used to be, looking towards Beach Hill from Victoria Road.

I know that people are still nostalgic about Beach Hill, and I get it, I totally understand it. But I think this footbridge is a lovely looking thing. It means that you can walk or cycle from one side of the Afan Way across to Victoria Road, without risking life and limb. But more than that, the blue arch gives at an elegance. I’ve no doubt that it makes the bridge stronger, but they could have built a perfectly strong footbridge without it, and we’d be the poorer if they had.

You can head out of the town, but still remain in the Borough of Neath and Port Talbot, and see a couple of places where the area’s former railway infrastructure has been used with some imagination. A former railway line makes a wonderful track through Afan Argoed Country Park for walking or cycling. This is the former Cynonville Station, rather overgrown now, but still a nice picnic spot.

If you walk under the bridge on the left of the background, then you eventually get to Pontrhydyfen, with its lovely aqueduct and viaduct. Or rather you used to. When I made this sketch the path was blocked off close to Pontrhydyfen and I had to climb up to the roadway. If you walk the other way from Cynonville, it’s a bit of a step, but you eventually come to Cymmer, and this place:-

This is the former Cymmer station, now a café restaurant, called the Refreshment Rooms, but commonly known as The Refresh. I’m not saying that it is the most sunning station ever built, but it’s nice, and it demonstrates something which I like very much – the ability to look carefully at what we have, and change its purpose to make it relevant, so it can keep serving the town, and the town can keep enjoying it.

 

What's notable about Port Talbot? 1) Public Sculpture

 

Do you know, it’s only now that I’ve realised that there is actually very little public sculpture in Port Talbot? This does surprise me a little bit. After all, the common thing for a Victorian port and industrial town was for notable civic dignitaries and benefactors to have self-aggrandizing statues put up in prominent public spaces so that the hoi polloi could be reminded of who they should be grateful to. Nearby Neath, for example, has some. Port Talbot’s most prominent family in Victorian and Edwardian times were the Talbots, but thankfully they didn’t leave statues behind them, which is just as well because although absolutely minted they weren’t very picturesque.
 
Ironically, though, Port Talbot’s largest collection of public sculptures is in the grounds of their former home, Margam Castle. Now, on that subject, I think it’s worth me stating that a visit to the Tate Modern a few years ago confirmed that I am a philistine, and that I have neither understanding of, nor any emotional response to modern art. So while not all of the sculptures in the park do anything much for me, I’m willing to accept that this is my own fault. I’m very fond of this one, mind you. It’s by Glynn Williams, and called “The Shout”. I made this pencil sketch about 10 years ago.

It hasn't scanned very clearly because it's graphite pencil - this next sketch was made at the same time of another of the sculptures I rather like in Margam Park

Moving closer to town, in Taibach we have the war memorial in the Talbot Memorial Park. I’ve sketched this a couple of times. 

The memorial itself was erected in 1925; since then names of men of the town who died in the forces in World War II have also been added. It was sculpted by Louis Frederick Roslyn, and was unveiled on 4 July 1925 by Sir William R. Robertson. The park in which it stands was donated to the town by Miss Emily Charlotte Talbot of Margam Castle, and opened to the public in 1926.  25 or 30 years ago the council cleaned up the statue, and it seemed as if the whole thing had been left in a vat of coca cola for a week, since all the patination was taken away. I don’t know, maybe it was given a special coating of something. It just didn’t look right. Time has given it some of its patination and age back and it’s all the better for it now.

 

In the centre of the town, though, the only public sculptures were all erected since I moved to the town in 1986. I can’t remember exactly when Sebastien Boyesen’s “Man of Steel” was first erected between the then Police Station, and the railway station, but I fancy it was the late 1990s. As the title suggests, it’s made to honour the town’s links with the steel industry. That’s wholly praiseworthy in my book. I’ve always liked this statue, although not necessarily for any reason you might think. I like it because it’s incongruous. It seems rather out of place. For years just the sight of it was enough to put me in mind of Soviet Expressionist art from the Stalinist era. Our broad-shouldered Stakhanovite hero of the working class, going about his industrial heroics on a tall plinth, inspiring the proletariat to greater and greater feats of industry. I also like the way he seems to be carrying several planks of two by four, even though he’s supposedly a steel worker. Since it was erected the little green it stood on has gone, and it was moved to make it easier to build the mini ghost town that is the new bus station. I’m glad it’s still there.

 

The council had a couple of works of art installed to mark the Millennium. Once of these was a question mark shaped set of bronze tiles, decorated with designs and poetry, which was inset into the pavement on the entrance to the town’s main open air car park behind station road. This was stolen, apparently in broad daylight, in 2019. There’s little I can say about that – it would be childish for me to say that I hope that the perpetrators’ genitalia rots and drops off, although in all honesty I wouldn’t shed a tear if it did.

 

Thankfully, Sebastien Boyesen’s “Mortal Coil” is still in place beside the main post office. I like this one even more than “Man of Steel” This one too commemorates the town’s long associating with the metal working industries – going back to a copperworks which was established here in the 18^th century. I like the colour more than the gleaming chrome plating of “Man of Steel”. Also, it’s a more complex image. We have the altogether more human metalworker bent at his task, but he’s inside a huge wheel. What does it symbolise – the human being trapped within the wheels of industry? Is it showing the human heart providing the fuel for the wheels of industry? Probably both and more. I like the fact that it incorporates a poem by Port Talbot poet Hadyn Harries. For me this is a more typical example of Boyesen’s public work, and sits well alongside “The Bell Carrier” in Newport, and other public works in Doncaster and Blackburn, for example.

Then there's the astrolabe based sculpture outside the civic centre

I think it was designed by someone called H Christie, and it quite adequately reflects Port Talbot''s status as a port town - ironic since it isn't much of a port now. It's totally inoffensive, and I do like the lickle boat on the top. 

 

There are a couple of sculptures to be seen at Aberavon Beach. The Taper, and Kite Tail were both the work of Carmerthen based artist Andrew Rowe. Now, once you know what it’s called, it is easy to see what Kite Tail represents. 

However, before I knew what it represented, both my wife and I thought it was a musical treble clef gone mad. Kite Tail was said to be the largest piece of public sculpture in Wales when it was erected in 2007. It’s bigger than it’s companion piece, the Taper. 

Again, when you know what it’s called it makes perfect sense, but until then, it always reminded me of one half of a broken clothes peg without the spring.

 

The Four Winds bar and restaurant used to boast this sculpture laying above the entrance. Cards on the table, I always really rather liked this representation of a gigantic sunbather, because I think it shows a rather appealing aspect of the town. Let’s be honest, this beer bellied sun worshipper  wasn’t exactly a flattering image to represent the town’s beach users, but it shows a town at ease with itself and able to joke about itself. Originally  there were proposals to remove it as long ago as 2003, but protests from locals saved it at least for a few years.

 

Public protests also saved the concrete whale and these penguins nearby. I don’t know when it was first erected, but it was before I moved here in 1986. Sadly the other set of penguins, the other side of Franco’s restaurant were removed, and so was the remarkable submarine rising diagonally out of the ground behind Francos, although it was replaced by a playground and skate park.

I've Been Thinking . . .

 When I started this blog in 2017, I really didn’t have much of a purpose behind it, other than fulfilling a challenge to myself to draw 100 urban sketches in and of Port Talbot. I made myself the challenge as a way of helping occupy my mind when I was recovering from a bout of clinical depression. After I completed the 100 sketches, I did tail off somewhat. It wasn’t because I wasn’t sketching, but just that I wasn’t sketching in Port Talbot so much as in other places. 

In the Autumn of 2019, my oldest daughter, who is the manager of the Oxfam Shop, approached me with a proposition. “Dad,” she said, “We had a sketch come into the store of Port Talbot, and it sold almost straightaway for £30. Yours are no worse than that. D’you think you could do some sketches for me to sell in the shop?” To cut a long story short, that’s what I did, and they all sold. Intrigued by the possibilities, I produced some more sketches of Port Talbot, which I used to make 2020 calendars, postcards and prints, which I sold, along with the originals, in a couple of craft fairs. It was an interesting and pretty enjoyable experience, mildly profitable too, and I was planning to do some more craft fairs during the Spring. Along came lockdown. 

Once it looked like my daughter could start preparing to reopen the shop, I produced 14 more Port Talbot drawings for the shop. Of those drawings, only 7 show buildings which are still standing, and of those, 3 are churches of which only St. Mary’s is still functioning as a church, only the façade remains of the school, only the façade of the Plaza Cinema will remain of the original building when work is finished. Other than that there’s the ore cranes, and the steelworks. 

This hearkening back to the town’s past is quite a conscious choice on my part, and on my daughter’s. If you want to call it cynical then hey, that’s your prerogative. It made sense to us to do so. There’s a body of opinion in the town that the heart and soul of it were ripped out when swathes of old Aberavon and the centre of town were demolished in the early 70s, allowing for the shopping centre and eventually the civic centre to be built. People who are old enough to remember the town as it was are our target customers.

 It’s very easy for me to say, yeah, I look at the pictures and what was pulled down had an awful lot more character than the civic centre, the shopping centre and the bus station. But life, real life, ain’t that simple. Yes, if the photographs were anything to go by, this area of town was denuded of some buildings which had enriched the town’s architectural heritage. I think in particular of the Municipal Buildings. I hope, and I’d like to think that now, such a building would be listed, and sympathetically redeveloped for other use today. 

Still, what the photographs don’t show is what it was like living in the town at that time. For example, photographs which show the station road level crossing which crossed Station Road look very picturesque, but people who used Station Road before it was taken away say that the traffic was awful, and removing it did at least solve that problem. I love the photographs of some of the old pubs and hotels which were swept away between 1970 and 1990, but could the town in the 80s and 90s really have generated the business to support them? Doubt it. 

I guess that what I’m getting at here is that you can’t preserve a town in aspic. I’ve been looking back over the drawings on this blog, and categorise them. Only 14 of them show buildings which aren’t there any more, and only two of these are buildings which have been completely demolished since I started the blog. 13 of the sketches don’t show any buildings or sculptures. Of the sketches that do show buildings or sculptures, one of them I have no idea when it was built. As for the rest, 39 show buildings or sculpture erected since the end of World War II, 16 which were erected between the two world wars, and no fewer than 43 erected before the first world war. Now, I admit that these are just based on the numbers of sketches, and doesn’t take into account places might have been drawn more than once. Still, it does suggest that there is more of Port Talbot’s architectural heritage remaining than we might have thought. So why do we have the view that it’s all been stripped away? Possibly because of a couple of factors. This is my take on it – feel free to disagree:-

·       The late 60’s/early 70s redevelopment was so sweeping, swept away so much, and above all else, did it in such a short space of time. During this redevelopment the town did lose a number of landmark buildings.

·       Because of the cataclysmic and traumatic nature of the redevelopment, every time a well known building of the town has been replaced since, people have been acutely aware of it, and relived the pain of the redevelopment

·       By and large, as a town we have become far more careful of our architectural heritage – for example look at the preservation of the façade of former Glanafan School, and the façade of the Plaza Cinema. One consequence of trying to preserve what remains, though, is to make people think about what doesn’t. 

So bearing all of this in mind, I want to ask, and try to answer, the question, what’s notable about the town and its buildings, sculptures, and public spaces?Of course, that’s not the kind of question you can answer quickly. So I plan to make a few posts about it.

Ty'r Orsaf , Station Road Port Talbot

 

This is Ty’r Orsaf. It’s a residential and retail development on the site of the old Port Talbot Police Station in station road, which I sketched in 2017 just before it was demolished. It’s not the sort of building I’d normally choose to draw for pleasure, and I’ll come back to that a little later, if I may.

 I will try to be objective about the building. It’s brick clad, which is better than bare concrete. At least the roofline has a little bit of interest because of the combination of different levels. There are no huge unrelieved expanses of brick, as there’s plenty of windows. On the front of the building, the asymmetric arrangement of the windows is more appealing to me than the symmetrical arrangement of the windows on the side of the building.

So, I like the building then? No, sorry, I don’t. Let me stress that I don’t actively dislike it, no. Although there’s about 30 years between the Civic Centre and this one, this building presents a very similar attitude to the passer-by – “All I ask,” it seems to say to me, “is that you don’t dislike me.” And I think it’s fair to say that it does enough to achieve this. But why don’t I actually like it? Well, let’s start with that flat roof. The building has only existed for a couple of years, and you can already clearly see patches of damp below a couple of the balconies on the side of the building. If there were some simple pitched roofs on the different roof levels, then not only would they make the drainage a lot easier, the building would look better as well.

If you look at the sketch, you can see there are areas of panelling on both the side and the front of the building. I really am not a fan of this. If you have to do it, then be bold! Go for scarlet. Go for deep purple. Go for viridian green. These, though, are copper coloured. There’s no sign of weathering, which is good, but hey, the building is only a couple of years old. What these will look like in a decade is anyone’s guess.

The building, to my mind, suffers from grudging ornamentation. Yeah, okay, said the architects, we’ll liven the building up with some balconies then, but all we’re prepared to give you are minimalist buggers, and don’t even think of getting some curves.  The result is that we’ve got a building that is arguably better than the police station that was there before it, but not much.

We could do so much better.  There’s an example of the kind of thing I’m talking about only a brisk walk away. I’m talking about Jubilee House on Victoria Road, which is also a retail and residential development. This was erected about 10 years ago. Just try to imagine what it would look like with flat roofs, then try to imagine it with blocky square balconies, rather than the curved and gleaming chrome that it sports. I like Jubilee House, and I don’t mind saying it. The ironic thing is that unlike Ty’r Orsaf, there was actually a more interesting building on the site before, the Vivian Park Hotel. Well, that’s gone, sadly, and I’m not holding it against Jubilee House.

 

I did say earlier that I’ll explain what it is that made me want to draw this unoriginal, unexciting building. In December 2018, one night a Banksy painting appeared on a garage a few streets away from where I live. Very quickly it made national, and soon after, international news. To give you an idea how much of a story it was, it can’t have been more than three days later I went early to work so that I could look at it on the way. There were crowds from all over Britain and some from places as far afield as the USA, and this was 6 o’clock in the morning! 

An art dealer bought the painting – well, the whole wall of the garage actually for a reported 6 figure sum. A deal was made with Port Talbot council so that the work would stay in the town for 3 years. Originally it was planned for a gallery to be built, but I don’t know that this was ever more than a plan. So where did it end up for its 3 year stay? Why, one of the empty retail units in Ty’r Orsaf! You have to look at it through the window, mind you, you can’t go in. I wouldn’t want to. Those retail units look dark and uninviting. 

I have mixed feelings about the Banksy though. You see, there was such a fuss about it when it was first found, and the almost universal reaction was – isn’t it wonderful that our town has been gifted this amazing thing? To which I can’t help thinking – gift? Really? Have you really looked at it, then? Because what it shows is a child, with a bobble hat and an anorak, close to a sledge, opening its mouth to taste the snowflakes falling all around it. Only they’re not snowflakes, for when you look around the corner of the wall you see that it’s the ash from a fire in a burning metal bin. Let’s think about that for a minute, fellow citizens of Port Talbot. Banksy was supposedly inspired to visit Port Talbot and leave this mural after reading that Port Talbot was measured with the worst air quality in the UK earlier in 2018. Yes, that mural is telling the world that not only do we in Port Talbot have the worst air quality in the UK, but we are so accepting of it, we care so little about it, that our children even mistake ash for snow. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a brilliant piece of work. But I just think that the huge outbreak of pride in Port Talbot that it created at the time really wasn’t what Banksy intended. 

Port Talbot Civic Centre

 

The Civic Centre in Port Talbot is a building about which my feelings are decidedly mixed. I first moved here in 1986, and they were in the process of building this at the time, and it opened a couple of years later. The building actually incorporates Port Talbot’s only really sizeable entertainment venue, the Princess Royal Theatre, which occupies the wing on the right hand side of the picture.

Even if you didn’t know, by looking carefully at the building you could probably tell when it was built. Room for the whole complex was created when the guts were ripped out of the town in the redevelopment of the early 70s, when much of the character of the town was demolished along with the buildings that were there previously. The first real fruit of that was the Aberavon Shopping Centre. Now, had the Civic centre been built in the early or mid 70s, I guarantee it would have been a quite different beast. I’d say the thousands of yellow bricks with which the building is faced wouldn’t have been used for a start. But by the 80s even the most devoted apologists for brutalist architecture were forced to admit that to most of the population, the only difference between the typical brutalist civic buildings vomited up by local councils in the UK and a steaming bucket of shit, was the bucket. What resulted, though, was a void in which the civic architectural departments (if such a thing existed) across the land were forced to scratch their heads and ask the question – if not more concrete boxes, then, what next?

The solutions, as shown in this particular building, were not necessarily that inspiring. Concrete goes crappy in the British climate? Face it with brick, then. Flat roofs don’t work in Britain because, du-huh, it rains occasionally? Give it a pitched roof then. However, what you have in buildings of this time, though, are very unimaginative uses of more attractive elements. Take the main entrance. It’s lumpy, and slab-like. There’s more than a hint of the architect here clinging stubbornly to his brutalist principles. Curves? Brrr, we don’t want any of those, here. Yes, the Princess Royal Theatre Wing looks better, but even there, using the columns so that the ground floor could be inset to give an arcade feel, seems to have been done very grudgingly. There’s no ornamentation, not variation at all to those square columns – the only way they could be more blank and featureless would have been to not face them with brick. Like a lot of buildings from this period, the architect has somewhat grudgingly eschewed full blown brutalism, but not really known what to do with the building instead, thus falling back on incorporating elements of an earlier vernacular without really having any idea of how to use them effectively. Take the roof. On civic buildings, the roof could and probably should be a notable feature. Not here. Here’ it’s just a roof. It’s a pitched roof because pitched roofs give more protection from the elements than flat ones, but that’s about it. 

However, I don’t want you to get the idea that I hate this building. I don’t, and I don’t even dislike it. Which to be honest, I think must have been what the architect had in mind. Brutalist buildings, to me, often shout “Yeah, go on, hate me. I don’t give a shit!” This one doesn’t. This one says, “Don’t hate me. Please, please, don’t hate me!”  and I’d be surprised if anyone does. The problem is that it does so little to make anyone feel any real affection for it. The clock above the entrance encapsulates this. Above the entrance there is this huge, slabby, flat expanse of brick. It is the perfect place to put some ornamentation, something to relieve that impersonality of the entrance. So the architects and designers put a clock there. Good idea. Okay, they say, you can have your clock, but we’re damned if we’re going to give you anything fancy!- and let’s be fair, they lived up to that promise. We have the hands. Then we have the numbers arranged  on the brick wall where anyone with a soul would have put some kind of clockface, at the very least. Personally, an oversized cuckoo clock, where a life sized statue of Richard Burton springs out on the hour to announce what o’clock it is, and whether all is well,is what I would have chosen to put there. Another opportunity missed by the council. 

With regards to the sculpture, this was, if I remember correctly erected an unveiled a couple of years after the building opened. High wooden fences were erected all around it. The nature of what was being erected was so secret that only half of the town knew what it was going to be. I remember upsetting a colleague of mine at work, who reckoned that they would be putting up a statue of her relative, the late Lord Heycock. I knew nothing of him then, and little of him now, so can’t comment on her assertion that he merited a statue because he had done a lot for the town. Whatever the case, this was what was revealed. I don’t know the name of the artist who created it, but it’s supposed to be based on an astrolabe, and it represents the world – with the ship obviously symbolising the town’s Port status. Less obviously, the whole thing is meant to symbolise that the borough of Neath and Port Talbot is forward looking and ready to accept new advanced developments – although as the building behind it shows, in architecture, nah, not so much.