100) Talbot Memorial Park War Memorial and Bandstand

Yes, dearly beloved, I decided that I would return to the subject of my very first sketch, the war memorial for this one hundredth. 

1) Talbot Memorial Park War Memorial

Of course, I wasn't going to show just the memorial, which is why I've included the bandstand. A grade II listed structure in its own right, the bandstand is typical of the sort of thing that almost every park in every town could boast once upon a time. It's in a bit of a state at the moment, but the calls on the public funds are many, and I understand that repairing the bandstand is not a priority. 

99) Dyffryn Chapel, Ffrwdwyllt Street, Port Talbot

I've been away for my annual trip to Spain for almost the last fortnight, and that's why I haven't posted in that time. All the sketches I made while I was away were sketches of Spain, for rather obvious reasons.

This is Dyffryn Chapel, which I believe must be one of the largest chapels in Port Talbot. It's a grade II listed building, and disused at the moment. There's been several stories about it in the last couple of decades, but I don't know how true it is that I was bought by a developer who was then refused planning permission to convert it into dwellings. 

The chapel is situated right by the river Ffrwdwyllt - unpronounceable for anyone like me who was brought up in England, I'm afraid. 

98) Taibach Rugby Club

Continuing with the line and wash sketch theme here. Taibach Rugby Club allegedly was a favourite haunt of Port Talbot's most famous son, Richard Burton (although Oscar winner Sir Anthony Hopkins runs him a close record, and Oscar nominated Michael Sheen isn't that far behind either). In this century alone two British Lions players have come through its ranks, so the club is obviously doing something right. More importantly, it was also the venue for my son's 18th Birthday party - which was longer ago than I care to discuss at this moment. 

76) Gibeon Congregational Church, Taibach

I found this building while I was looking at the former Picturedrome Cinema (Number 71) Former Picturedrome Cinema, Taibach).

To be fair, Port Talbot is not short of a choice of places of worship, but of the older ones, this is one of the best looked after – well, judging by the exterior, anyway. Sometimes you start to research the places that you’ve sketched and it’s relatively easy to find basic details about when it was  built, and any significant happenings involving it. Then other times you just end up drawing a blank, as I did with the Gibeon. I used this sketch for a demonstration of method that beginners could use to construct a sketch of a building, which is why you might notice pencil lines on this one. Normally I don’t use pencil at all when I make a sketch now.

71) Former Picturedrome CInema, Taibach

Similar to the Ware House gym (Number 62) Ware House Gym) – this unassuming residential block was once one of Port Talbot’s many cinemas. Unlike the Ware House Gym, though, you’d never have known this to look at it. I’m not surprised that the Picturedrome closed. The surprising thing is that it ever opened in the first place. For one thing it is stuck away in a back street. For another thing, although it looks like a decent size in this picture – and as a residential block it is – frankly, as a cinema I found it small. Yes, I found it so, since although it closed in 1984, it opened again in December 1986, after I’d moved to the town. Of all of the town’s cinemas it probably had the reputation of being the bargain basement version. After all, it’s nickname was ‘the cach’. Now, you don’t need a GCSE in Welsh to figure out that this means something brown and steaming which comes out of Cowes – and I’m not talking about the Isle of Wight Ferry. I did actually see a couple of films – “The Name of the Rose” and “Little Shop of Horrors” – and it didn’t seem particularly unhygienic to me, but whatever the case, it only lasted a year or two before closing again, and within a few years had been converted into a nursing home. 

68) Outside the Somerset Arms on a sunny Sunday Evening

I thought long and hard about how whether to sketch much of the pub itself, but decided on reflection that the pub really isn’t the story, while the people are. Which is not to say that the Somerset Arms itself isn’t worth sketching, since it is. But the story is basically that on any sunny Sunday early evening both this, and the forecourt of the Old Surgery on the other side of the main road, are full of life, full of people. I felt more drawn to the Somerset because the Old Surgery at the time was full of a much younger crowd, and I felt more comfortable sketching people of a comparable vintage to myself.

64) Checkouts in Aldi, Taibach

I wanted to sketch this one because it illustrates a change which has happened in terms of shopping in Port Talbot. When I first moved here, Tescos was the only ‘big’ supermarket in town. Yes, there was a Coop Pioneer store in Sandfields, but that was a bus ride away. When Tesco built their new store in the 1990s, they were really the only game in town. However, a significant proportion of that game has been taken away by an Aldi store which opened in Taibach a few years ago. I just wanted to make a sketch which illustrated the place, and also gave a hint about the basic problem with Aldi – people buy trolleys full of stuff, and despite the multiple lanes of tills, only one or at most two are ever open. Cuts down costs, I suppose.

62) Ware House Gym

It’s fair to say that this building sits rather uncomfortably between the 1920s houses and shops on either side, and the 1990s supermarket a little further along the road. It certainly looks as if it has not been a gym, or indeed an ordinary shop all its life, and this impression is correct. Does it look all that much like a former cinema, though? Maybe when you see it from the back, and get an impression of the real size of it. This was opened in 1936, although it closed as a cinema decades before I moved to the town. I look at the building and it makes me wonder how a town the size of Port Talbot ever supported the number of cinemas it once had. To give you an idea, when I first moved in 1986, the town had one working cinema, the Plaza, one cinema about to reopen before the end of the year, the Picturedrome, one converted former cinema, the Regal (this one), and one completely derelict cinema, the Odeon. At least a couple of other former cinema buildings in Aberavon were demolished in the rebuilding of the town centre in the 1970s. I’m not certain of this, but I think that in the late 1940s, after the war, there may even have been as many as 6 cinemas working in Port Talbot. Cinema going was at an all time high at that time – television ownership didn’t really start to soar until the Coronation in the 1950s. Even so, though, 6 cinemas! I’ve never been inside the building – well, it is a gym, after all – but as an exterior it isn’t that striking. But I’m drawn to it because of the way it’s been repurposed. It’s fairly obvious if you look at my sketches and read the text that I like striking, pretty, or impressive older buildings, but I’m not so blind that I can’t see that an empty building quietly mouldering away does nobody any good. As an alternative to demolition, repurposing a building like this works for me.

57) Talbot Memorial Park Gates and Lodges

The Talbot Memorial Park is next door to St. Theodore’s Church, which is significant since I believe that this was also largely the creation of the Talbot family of Margam Park. The inscription shows that the Park was first opened in 1925. It’s a grade II listed structure, as are the two lodge houses on either side of the gates. As you enter the park, the house on the right is occupied, but the house on the left is in need of some renovation, and is fenced off to prevent access.

16: St. Theodore's Church, Taibach

This is a less successful line and wash picture, in my opinion. It focuses on the details of one of the side doorways of the church. I do live literally less than 100 yards from this church, and it's surely one of the biggest in the whole of Port Talbot.

In 1901 it became the mother church of the parish of St. Theodores. The building of the church was heavily subsidised by Emily Charlotte Talbot - a member of the family after whom the town is named - who inherited Margam Castle after the sudden early death of her brother Theodore.

15) Forest Veterinary Practice, Theodore Road

I still think of this building as the Afan Arts Centre, which was a previous incarnation of the same building. This sketch was made from the adjacent Talbot Memorial Park, ad I have to say it's possibly my most successful ink and wash picture. There's loads of things I like in architecture, and a hotch potch of pitched roofs is one of them, and this has a great collection of roofs, which I concentrated on in this sketch. This is one of the last three sketches I made before the trip to Prague, which I mentioned in the introduction post, and which was so important to me for the reasons I've already gone into.

13) Ffwrdwyllt House, Commercial Road

If for no other reason than this, I would have wanted to sketch Ffrwdwyllt House because, to an English person, it has a name which manages to be very long and have no vowels at the same time. I'm joking. For me this is a great example of civic architecture. I don't know exactly when it was built, but it has that heavy, self important late Victorian/Edwardian air about it. Engraved around the middle of the façade it makes it clear that this was built as a council building. Out of interest the name comes from the stream which runs just a few yards from the house, which I'd guess is one of the tributaries of the Afan, and it stands on the same road as Taibach Library.

5) Taibach Library

My second pen and ink sketch of Port Talbot using the specialist pen is Taibach Library. I like this building very much, and in fact I painted it in acrylics some time before making this sketch. It lies on the A48, the main road eastwards out of the centre of the town, and there are several other buildings on the same road which I've since sketched.

Taibach Library was cut by Neath Port Talbot Council a couple of years ago, but is currently manned and staffed by a group of wonderful volunteers. The building was one of over 600 created through the behest of the famous Scots American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie - this was a later one, having been built in 1916 by architect John Cox.

1)War Memorial - Talbot Memorial Park - Graphite HB Pencil

This HB pencil sketch is one of the first sketches I made after reading about the Urban Sketching movement. I was still very much experimenting with materials for sketching , and so this was pretty much a case of using what I know - and ordinary pencil. The statue stands on top of the War Memorial in Talbot Memorial Park in Taibach. I made the sketch sitting on a park bench close by. As I was doing so, a young lad approached me, had a good look at it, and then passed judgement with the words - "You quite a good draw-er, aren't you." Thank you very much. 

The memorial itself was rected 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. Currently the memorial is one of Port Talbot's Grade II listed buildings.