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.

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.

The Plaza Cinema was built during the first months of the Second World War in a high Art Deco style and opened in 1940.In 1983 it was closed as a cinema and opened as a bingo club, however it reopened as a cinema in 1985. The cinema finally closed in January 1999, with the last film shown being the Prince of Egypt. The Plaza was grade II listed later in 1999. NPTBC acquired the cinema building in 2009.

I've sketched the cinema on several occasions. I actually made two sketches based on the photograph that I used for the top picture, and both of them were sold for Oxfam. 

 

Majestic (Odeon) Cinema

Here are 2 views of the Majestic Cinema in Forge Road, which was also called the Odeon before closing.

The Majestic opened in 1938, just 2 years before the Plaza. It was taken over by the Odeon group later in its life, and during the 1970s became a bingo hall. The building finally closed for good in 1980, and was demolished as part of the development of the new Tesco site in 1995. 

 

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. 

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.

6) Plaza CInema

When I first moved to Port Talbot in 1986, the Plaza was the only working cinema in town, although there were several other buildings which had once been cinemas but either stood derelict, or had been transformed into different types of premises. I remember watching "Back to the Future on its glorious big screen" not long after I moved here. It's still another of my favourite buildings in the town, and one which I've also painted in acrylic.

The Plaza, a glorious Art Deco building which was opened in 1940, has been unoccupied since closing in 1999. For several years there have been discussions in the council about refurbishing the building, possibly as an Arts Centre, but I don't believe that any positive action has yet been taken.