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.
