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.