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.

Municipal Buildings

I'm informed that the Afan Shopping Centre stands roughly where this magnificent Victorian building once stood. The 1970s redevelopment of the centre of Port Talbot and Aberavon is often criticised. Playing Devil's advocate. I'm told that the old level crossing in Station Road made the centre of town into a permanent traffic jam, and the opportunities offered by the shopping centre may well have attracted businesses and jobs to the town. But the price paid, in losing buildings like this, was a heavy one. 

 

Afan Lido

Continuing with  a selection of Port Talbot's lost buildings, this is the Afan Lido, on the sea front. The Afan Lido was Port Talbot's Leisure Centre. 

The Afan Lido was opened in 1965 by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. The Lido boasted one of the only Olympic sized swimming pools in Wales, and the venue hosted large-scale concerts with world famous bands. In 2009 the building was gutted by fire, and had to be demolished, with a new facility opening in 2015.

Aberavon Seaside Station

 

Aberavon (Seaside) Station was opened on 14^th March 1895 by the Rhondda and Swansea Bay Railway Company. It was incorporated into the Great Western Railway in 1923, and was finally closed on 3^rd December, 1962. 

I believe that the Afan Way was built along the old track bed of the railway here - Hence Beach Hill and the Gas Works off Victoria Road in the background

Aberavon Miami Beach Funfair

 

This is another view of the funfair based on a different photo. The funfair stood more or less where the Mariners' Quay development is now. 

Aberavon Miami Beach Funfair

 

These are the two versions I've made of this sketch, both based on the same photograph. The Miami Beach amusement park opened on Aberavon seafront in the early 1960s, and closed in the late 1970s/early 1980s. It was long gone by the time I moved here in 1986. 

The earlier sketch, which is the top one, was sold to raise money for our local Oxfam shop. 

108) Remo's, Aberavon Beach

I meant to do Remo's last year as one of my original 100 sketches. I never quite found the time. Today I was one of the teachers accompanying pupils from the school on a sponsored walk to Aberavon beach in aid of Alzheimer's charities, and I made this sketch at Remo's, our turnaround point.

Off the point a little - last year I made a sketch of Franco's on Aberavon Beach.

I'm very proud to say that this image currently adorns the menus in Francos.

102) Autumn Funfair Aberavon Beach

Yes, it's been a while, hasn't it? Been back at work, and away, that's my excuse. Still, half term this week, and I made this sketch last Saturday, early in the morning before anything started happening with the fair. This was all part of the annual Bonfire Night/Halloween festivities. I recall that the council did once shift it to Margam Park when there was work going on at the beach. Utter disaster is probably the most accurate description of that evening.

I'm not going out of my way to make sketches of Port Talbot in the way that I did to complete the first 100, but on the same hand I'm not going to stop now just because I have completed the 100. So I've also made a couple of other sketches today.

101) Water Street Business Centre

What? Isn't the blog entitled 100 Faces of Port Talbot - not 101?! Well it is, and I'm not going to change the title. Still, the thing is this. I've enjoyed making these sketches so much that I just don't want to stop. So whenever I do another sketch of Port Talbot, then I'll add it to the blog. Hey, it's my blog - and I make the rules. 

So this is the Water Street Business Centre. For my first two decades in Port Talbot this building was actually the local Health Centre where I and my family would see our GP. That moved some time ago to a purpose built building in Sandfields which actually houses several different practices. For a while after the Health Centre moved this held a local radio studio. Now, though, it's a business centre, although how many businesses are based there I couldn't rightly say.

I wouldn't go so far as saying that I think this is a particularly handsome building, but I do like it as an example of the way that not every building built between the 50s and the end of the 70s is absolutely pug ugly. Damning with faint praise? Well, sorry, but I'm not going to lie. 

96) McDonalds Aberavon

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

89) Bar Gallois, Aberavon

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

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

88) Leisure and Fitness Centre

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

78) Franco's Restaurant, Aberavon Beach

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

72) Concrete Penguins, Aberavon Beach

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

54) Vivian Park Lodge, Sandfields/Aberavon

I would guess that this rather appealing house was something to do with the park itself once upon a time , since it’s set back from the road and actually within the boundaries of the park so it seems, although it is fenced off from the rest of the park. Vivian Park is home to one of Sandfields’ only listed buildings, the War Memorial.

51) Beach Hill Footbridge, Aberavon

A well known Port Talbot landmark when I first moved here was known as Beach Hill. Basically It was a hump backed road bridge which carried Victoria Road in Aberavon over the two lane highway of the Afan Way. A body of public opinion was very disgruntled when the decision was taken to replace the bridge with a road junction, which has admittedly made it far easier to join the Afan Way, and this rather elegant footbridge.

31) Aberafan Shopping Centre

Prior to my visit to Prague it would never have occurred to me that I might make a sketch of the shopping centre. Yet it seemed an obvious thing to do after I’d started sketching the town again after my return. The shopping centre is probably the most obvious result of the town centre redevelopment in the 1970s. When you look at books of old photographs of Port Talbot centre, it’s easy to become critical when you see the buildings that were lost. However, talking to people who lived in the town at the time, it is a fact that a level crossing not far from where the shopping centre stands now used to cause huge traffic problems in Station Road.

29) St. Joseph's RC Church, Water Street. Line and Wash

St. Joseph’s is a Roman Catholic Church, which was built in 1930 to replace a building from the 1860s, and it belongs to the Catholic diocese of Menevia. For a 20th century church, I like this a lot. I believe that it was built largely through the efforts of Port Talbot’s Roman Catholic community, including my wife’s grandparents.I made a video, currently available on Youtube, which shows the different stages I went through to produce what I think is possibly my favourite line and wash sketch.

27) Boats on the Afan line and wash

This was made on the same day as the previous sketch, from a position just a few yards further along the path, looking down on the boats that were actually on the Afan that day. . It’s far more impressionistic, since I made the conscious decision to apply as few ink lines as possible, and let the watercolour do more of the work. I quite like the reflections of the boats, and again, as my attempts at line and wash go, it’s not that bad.