Every room in the Antioch Centre is open free a week on Friday, and for nearly all of it you can just walk in.
Face painting, glitter tattoos, pebble decorating and bracelet making in the main hall. Indoor games in the Garden Room. Sing-alongs and meet-and-greets with the snow sister princesses. Free drinks and cake in the café.
It runs 10am to 2pm on Friday 7 August, in from the car park on Copperworks Road.
There’s a reason for the party. Antioch is marking three anniversaries at once: 40 years since the church began in someone’s front room, 30 years in this building, and 10 under its current leaders, Pastors Ben and Beth Taylor.
(Image: Antioch Centre)
Everyone in Llanelli remembers Crazy Maisie’s
For a lot of Llanelli parents, one name on the day’s map will do all the work on its own.
Crazy Maisie’s was where the birthday parties happened, right through the late nineties and the 2000s. Covid closed that chapter, and the soft play came back in 2024 for community sessions instead.
(Image: Antioch Centre)
It’s the one thing on the day you can’t just wander into. The bookable slots have gone, but the centre has held spaces back in every hour to release on the day, for children aged nine and under. Worth turning up.
What the place does the other 51 weeks
For most of those 30 years the work has been steady and unglamorous.
Lifeshare, the food and clothes bank, has run here since December 2011, open Tuesdays and Thursdays on a voucher system with flexibility for those who need it.
The Wheelhouse café runs a pay-it-forward scheme, so anyone who can afford it can leave a meal behind for someone who can’t. FAN, Friends and Neighbours, meets for anyone who just wants the company.
Where it does all this matters. Antioch sits where the Glanymor and Tyisha wards meet at the railway line. Tyisha is the most deprived ward in Carmarthenshire, in streets where £20m of Pride in Place money is about to land.
A blood clinic, a youth club and a plaque by the door
The building has kept absorbing whatever the town needed. The fun day’s cookalongs, run by Cegin y Bobl, happen in a room that spent a decade as the Hywel Dda blood test clinic, and before that was Mission Music, a youth club that pulled in as many as 100 young people in a night.
Even the café’s name is borrowed. The blue plaque outside records that this was the Stepney Spare Wheel Works, which made the spare wheel two Llanelli ironmongers invented and sold it across Europe and America. In India and Pakistan a spare wheel is still called a stepney to this day.
What happens to Crazy Maisie’s next
The birthday-party era is over for good; the centre says private party hire isn’t coming back. Instead it’s asking the community what the room should become, with coffee mornings and community groups on the table and a survey open for other ideas.
Senior church leader Ben Taylor said the fun day was a thank you as much as a celebration. “What was once a derelict factory has, through God’s faithfulness and the dedication of the congregation alongside the support of the wider community, been transformed into a thriving community centre that serves people from across the area.”
He said everyone was welcome.
Friday 7 August, 10am to 2pm, Antioch Centre, Copperworks Road, SA15 2NE. Free, no booking needed.
