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.