Taibach Community Centre, Port Talbot
Telling the story of Port Talbot and the Community Centre at its heart
As a community heritage project, we were delighted to work with Maltings on our new heritage trail and timeline. When we first started looking for interpretive designers, we worried that we were too small for an established company like Maltings, but Mike and Steve absolutely took our project seriously and gave us exceptional value for money within a tight budget. Their customer service was outstanding and they worked really hard to ensure that we were happy at every stage of the process.
Dr. Sadie Jarrett
(Heritage Manager - Taibach Community Education: Past to Present)
Taibach Community Centre (TCC) was formerly Margam Copperworks School - built by the owners for the children of the workers in 1829. It was renamed Eastern Boys & Girls in the early 20th century, and its most famous pupil was the actor Richard Burton who first took to the stage in school productions in the assembly hall. The school closed in 1965 and became Taibach Youth Centre, and more latterly Taibach Community Centre, offering a range of educational classes, activities and facilities to local people of all ages. Funding cuts in 2015 brought the threat of closure, but the community took action and the centre continued under the new ownership of Port Talbot CIC.
Heritage Lottery funding was secured for vital repairs to the building and to help to ensure a sustainable future for the TCC. As with all NLHF grants, interpretation was a stipulation of funding and we were fortunate to win the commission via tender invitation. The interpretation brief specified a timeline - the history of Port Talbot and the old school - and a trail comprising six panels which offered a more detailed history of the building. The total budget available to us was a little over £18,000 to completion. Many who visit the centre would not normally frequent museums, so our interpretation had to be accessible and interesting to the broadest possible demographic. Additionally, having some familiarity with the history of the area and the challenges faced by the local community we wanted to give them something to be proud of and create a real asset for the TCC.
Both the timeline and trail would be unique for the area, and the client team provided a wealth of research undertaken by volunteers. Through client consultation, we developed an overall structural and design approach to the interpretation and our author started work on the text. However, our greatest challenge was a lack of usable image resources. Most archival images were printed as flat black halftones across a number of local history books, and nobody knew what had subsequently happened to the originals. More surprisingly, hardly any photographs had been taken in the 60 or so years since the school became a youth centre. We knew that widespread use of imagery was key to visitor engagement, so decided to make high resolution scans of the images in the history books and actually use the halftone screen as a feature of our designs. Additionally, we spent many hours searching for appropriate images online to support the archives we had, working to ensure that every entry on the timeline for Port Talbot had an image to support it. Finally we created a large, dramatic illustration of the 19th century copper miners to introduce the timeline, and also developed a set of six cartoons for the trail panels to engage families and children.
The interpretative displays were unveiled to the public at a special ‘Open Doors’ event in 2025 and visitors were given an opportunity to feedback. The reception was overwhelmingly positive, and many locals were surprised how much they learned about Port Talbot and the TCC. Dr. Sadie Jarrett and Matthew Ireland - the TCC manager - were genuinely a delight to work with, and we are particularly proud of how we collectively developed this project given the challenges of both budget and image resources. We very much hope that it encourages other smaller community heritage projects to not limit their ambitions - an imaginative, creative approach can produce displays that far exceed apparent cost and even expectation.
Maltings are members of the following professional organisations: Association for Heritage Interpretation, Group for Education in Museums, and Association of Illustrators.
