Sketches for Oxfam 2021

 Forgive me if you’ve seen previous posts on this subject, and you already know all of this, but in case you don’t . . . Way back in the mists of time, back in 2019 before lockdown, my daughter, Phillippa, who manages the Oxfam shop in Port Talbot came to me and said this. She’s had a line drawing of part of Port Talbot – it escapes me which now – in the shop, and sold it for £30. Her immortal words were , “Yours are no worse than that. Can yo do some for me?” Well it’s hard to turn down a request when you’re asked so nicely.

That initial tranche of sketches did very well for the shop, raising several hundred pounds. So when the shop reopened last summer after the first lockdown, I did some more, and without going into the actual figures, they raised a lot for the shop.

So, here we are again, shops opening all over the place, and with only a couple of sketches from the 2 dozen or so I made last year still in stock, Phillippa asked me to do some more. So here they are.

1) The Big Apple Aberavon Beach.

If you want to see a kiosk like this you have to go to Mumbles, the other side of Swansea, where there’s one in the car park right above Mumbles. This one used to stand on the prom in Aberavon Beach. I’ll be honest, I never saw it in person. I don’t know when it was removed, but it had certainly gone by the time I moved to Port Talbot in 1986. I’ll say more about this when I get onto the funfair, but it is difficult to understand what the local council were up to with Aberavon Beach on the 70s and 80s.

2) Ore Cranes

I’ve sketched Port Talbot’s iconic dock cranes several times before. I will come clean and admit this was purely a commercial decision. Don’t get me wrong, I love drawing the cranes, but also, they sell. We sold drawings of these cranes in both previous Oxfam selections, and during my first raft fair I sold one to our local MP. The sketch for Oxfam in 2020 is one of my best selling prints as well.

3, 4 and 5) Miami Beach Funfair Aberavon

The funfair was opened in 1963, I think, and closed in 1983, so for me it was a near miss – I was only 3 years late. I don’t know why it was closed down – although I can hazard a guess. Businesses rarely close because they’re doing well and making money. It’s a shame though – nearby Porthcawl’s Coney Beach has managed to keep going. The funfair is still very fondly remembered by a generation of Port Talbot’s citizens though. The second of these pictures was sold for the shop even before the shop reopened! One of my previous Oxfam sketches of the fair is amongst my best-selling prints.

4) Jersey Beach Hotel

We’re still down the beach again with this next one, and yes, I have drawn the Jersey Beach hotel before. I’ve made well over a hundred drawings of Port Talbot so repeating myself is something that’s going to happen, I’m afraid. The Jersey Beach Hotel was a fixture on the Aberavon Seafront for a long time, and I remember it quite well. I played my first ever big quiz final in there in 1988, when my team completed the Port Talbot League and cup double, and I won the individual (because the two better players in my team didn’t want to play in it.) The hotel closed for good in 1999, and was destroyed by fire a few years later.

5) Station Road with Level Crossing

In the last couple of years I drew the same scene of the level crossing twice, so I fancied a different view of it. I’m still in the 50s/60s with this sketch, but it’s done from the street level, and from the other side of the gate in this one. Station Road is probably Port Talbot’s main shopping street, even if many of the main stores have now moved into the Aberavon shopping centre. As for the level crossing, picturesque as it is, older inhabitants of the town remember it as causing real traffic problems. Looking at old photographs, it’s hard to disagree that the 1970s redevelopment of the town centre to make room for the shopping centre and the civic centre ripped the guts and the heart out of the centre of the town. Still, removing this picturesque traffic impediment was at least one positive development.

6) The Plaza Cinema

This building is currently in the process of a major redevelopment. The 1930s original façade is still standing, but the original building behind has been demolished, and a new purpose built arts centre is going up behind. I’m gong to reserve judgement until the building is actually completed and opened. I think it’s going to be important to remember that the Plaza, like most cinemas of the same period, may have had a fantastic façade (it did), but behind the façade it was largely a huge concrete barn.

I’ve sketched the Plaza for each of the previous Oxfam selections. Last year I sketched it from the station. This year I used the same reference photo that I used for the 2019 sketch – which incidentally is by some distance my best-selling print – and I changed the film. I’m a massive fan of the Indiana Jones movies (even the Crystal Skull) so I changed it to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade since I first saw that one here in the Plaza.

7) Shift Change at the Steelworks

This one shows steelworkers at shift change, walking along Ffrwdwyllt Street. This street has greatly changed since the reference photograph on which I based the drawing was taken. The chapel and some of the nearer houses are still there, but this entrance to the steelworks has been closed off, and you have to go to Margam. My steelworks pictures have always sold well in Oxfam, while steelworks are another of my bestselling prints, along with the Plaza, the Funfair and the Ore cranes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

26) Boat high and dry, Aberavon. Line and wash

If you walk along the path from the plate girder bridge up onto the Beach, you pass the estuary of the River Afan, and you can often see boats upon it. This boat was on a sort of platform affair, out of the River, and I liked the look of it, so I couldn’t resist sitting down and making a quick ink sketch with a couple of watercolour washes over the top of it. I ignored a few stares from cyclists and dog walkers as I did so. I think that this is one of my better attempts at applying watercolour to an ink sketch. The greenery is actually quite appealing.

25) Aberavon Beach, Mariners Quay - Line and Wash

Turning round on the spot on the vantage point from which I made the sketch with the cyclists, I made this line and wash sketch. The buildings on the right, collectively called Mariners Quay, are a residential development from the early noughties, which was partly built on the site formerly occupied by the Jersey Beach Hotel. I like Mariners Quay. The buildings do have a uniform quality, in terms of colour and style, but they have enough character to make them easy on the eye.

As a line and wash, I wouldn’t say that I’m completely happy with it, but then I never am with my watercolours. I think that I just don’t quite get colours.

24) Cyclists on Aberavon Beach

Both of the previous sketches were planned sketches, in the sense that I went to both places knowing that I was going to create a sketch, and pretty much what I was going to include in the sketch. This one wasn’t. It literally was a caught moment in time, when I had to work like the clappers to make these simplified sketches of the cyclists, and then sketch in where they had been once they’d gone. It’s an impulse sketch, and so much the better for it. This is the eastern end of the promenade of Aberavon Beach, and it’s a great place to cycle. Having the steelworks in the background is an added bonus as well.

You can see that this sketch marks a development in my attitude to what I choose to sketch, and the ways I choose to show the town, since it’s not about a man made structure at all.

23) The Three Cranes and ship

There’s a pathway which runs from the Aberavon end of the plate girder bridge, all the way uphill onto the promenade of Aberavon Beach. It passes by the docks, and one of the most iconic sights in Port Talbot, the three massive cranes which unload the ships carrying ore for the steelworks. I’ve always liked the 3 cranes, although I’ve never actually sketched the three of them before. . If you look on the bottom left, you’ll see I’ve also included a small figure of a lady who was walking her dog at the time. She would also feature in the next sketch. She works well for me, in as much as she give a sense of the massive scale of the cranes and the ship, especially when you consider that she was a lot nearer than they were when I made the sketch.

9) Mavericks - Aberavon Beach

Mavericks was the last name of this building, which has been a pub, club or bar since before I came to Port Talbot. When I first moved here it was the Port Talbot RAF Association Club, and it had a massive RAF roundel painted on the side of the building. This stands at the beach end of Victoria Road, several hundred yards from Jubilee House, shown in the previous picture.