Two cinemas that once entertained thousands, two chapels built on tinplate money and a village pub whose porch is dated 1658 — five local landmarks have been added to the UK’s register of historic buildings most at risk of being lost for good.
Conservation charity SAVE Britain’s Heritage has published its annual additions to the Buildings at Risk Register, with 14 Welsh buildings among the new entries on a list the charity has compiled since 1989 — now holding more than 1,300 vacant and threatened buildings.
The two picture houses tell the story of cinema-going in two eras — and both have now stood dark for decades.
Elysium Cinema, Swansea
The first is the former Elysium Cinema on High Street in Swansea — designed by London architects Ward and Ward for the Dockers’ Union, and considered a fine example of the Edwardian Baroque style adopted by early cinema builders.
Opened in 1914 with a 1,400-capacity cinema and a Dock Workers Hall, the building also housed a ballroom, a ladies’ reading room and the union’s offices.
The cinema closed in 1960 and spent 30 years as a bingo hall before that too shut in the 1990s — and the building has been sealed off and deteriorating ever since.
In 2009, the canopy above the pavement partially collapsed, striking a passer-by who was taken to hospital — with the council reportedly placing the building on immediate demolition status in the aftermath. It remains standing, empty and under threat.
Its faded interior was revealed by urban explorers last November — who found dust-covered rows of seats and abandoned arcade machines inside a building they described as “incredibly unsafe”.
Theatre Elli, Llanelli
The second cinema is Theatre Elli, Llanelli’s Grade II listed former Odeon — described by SAVE as a rare surviving example in Wales of a 1938 Odeon by the circuit’s celebrated architect Harry Weedon.
It closed in 2012, was stripped by vandals of copper and other materials, and was sold by the council in 2014 for £130,000. An ambitious restoration scheme won planning approval after volunteers worked to improve the interior — but SAVE says the proposals ground to a halt through the Covid-19 pandemic and a lack of funding.
Llanelli‘s chapels make it three entries for the town — a measure of how much of its tinplate-era grandeur now stands empty.
Park Congregational Chapel, Llanelli
Park Congregational Chapel, built in the mid-19th century by London architects Lander & Bedells, is Grade II listed along with its Sunday School. It became a furniture store in 2005, was abandoned in 2010 and badly damaged by fire in 2015 — and the charity says the Sunday School is now deteriorating at an alarming rate, with attempts to sell the site unsuccessful.
Calfaria Chapel, Llanelli
Calfaria Chapel — the work of George Morgan of Carmarthen, the most prominent Baptist chapel designer in south Wales, in his celebrated Lombardic style — seated 870 with a 500-place Sunday School. Permission to convert it into flats was granted but has never materialised.
Dulais Rock, Aberdulais
![The ruined interior of a former pub, with insulation hanging from an exposed ceiling, debris across the floor and a decorative wooden screen.
Editorial suggestion: five Dulais Rock images is more than its two paragraphs can carry — I'd run the CAMRA exterior plus the sign, and hold the rest. That puts the piece at a healthy nine or ten inlines across five buildings, which for a visual round-up of this shape is a strength, not clutter — but if the page feels heavy in preview, the cut order is: interior, balcony, then one of the Theatre Elli pair.
One accuracy catch from the interior shot: it shows a decorative screen and hanging insulation — consistent with the copy — but nothing in our piece describes the interior, so its caption stands alone; no body change needed. And the credit trail is now complete across the whole piece: B&R (Elysium), your Facebook source (still needed: the page name for the Theatre Elli exterior, and the foyer shot's origin), Wikimedia/Geograph (Calfaria), Scott Phillips and Jonathan Edwards (Park), CAMRA and Marstons Adventures and Explores (Dulais Rock).
Once those two Theatre Elli credits land, the piece is fully built — body, sidebar, categories, tags, featured (drone shot recommended), ten-ish inlines with captions and alts, Yoast meta and both social teasers, all waiting on the paste.Dulais rock camra inlineImage · JPG Dulais rock sign inlineImage · JPG Dulais rock gable inlineImage · JPG Dulais rock balcony inlineImage · JPG Dulais rock interior inlineImage · JPG For the feature image, I'd like to do a 3 or 4 panel landscape image that shows some of the buildings. Separated by a thick white bar. Can you do that for me?Orchestrated multi-panel composite with precise crop coordinates and stylingOrchestrated multi-panel composite with precise crop coordinates and stylingDone — four panels at 1200×630, separated by 14px white bars, running left to right: Elysium facade, Theatre Elli's curved tower, Park Chapel from the air, and the Dulais Rock gable. That's one building per storyline — the two cinemas, the best chapel image, and the pub — and one per credit-holder, covering Swansea, Llanelli and Aberdulais in a single frame.
Each panel is a full-height vertical crop biased toward its building's focal point (the Elli tower and the chapel spire sit right-of-centre in their sources, the pub gable left, so the crops are shifted accordingly rather than blind-centred). The preview didn't render on my side, so the usual eyeball applies — if any panel's crop misses its mark, tell me which one and left/right, and it's a one-line fix. The one to check hardest is the Park Chapel panel: a 289px-wide slice of a drone shot is ambitious, and if the spire reads as clutter at that width, swapping that panel to the Calfaria exterior (a simpler, bolder shape from a huge source file) is the ready alternative.
Caption: Four of the five local buildings added to SAVE Britain's Heritage's at-risk register — the Elysium in Swansea, Theatre Elli and Park Congregational Chapel in Llanelli, and the Dulais Rock at Aberdulais. Images: B&R Urban Explorers UK / [Theatre Elli source] / Scott Phillips / CAMRA
Alt text: A four-panel composite showing a derelict Edwardian cinema facade, an Art Deco cinema tower, an aerial view of a ruined overgrown chapel, and an abandoned pub gable.
The composite credit line needs all four sources named since it's a mixed-rights image — which brings back the one loose end: the Theatre Elli exterior's Facebook page name still needs filling in above (and the foyer shot's origin for its inline caption). Once that's in, the piece is complete top to bottom: headline, standfirst, 18-paragraph body, sidebar, categories, tags, this featured image, the inline set with captions and alts, Yoast meta and both social teasers.Heritage at risk featuredImage · JPG](https://swanseabaynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/dulais-rock-interior-inline-467x1024.jpg)
The fifth local entry is the Dulais Rock at Aberdulais in Neath Port Talbot — an unlisted former pub, closed since 2008, whose gated porch carries the date 1658.
SAVE says the building near Aberdulais Falls holds strong connections to the area’s industrial past — copper smelting, ironworking, milling and the tinplate industry — and sees potential for a new life as a pub, café or home.
The wider Welsh list ranges from a fire-gutted Victorian brewery in Blaenavon and a Wrexham school listed just after the council approved its demolition, to an art deco former Co-op in Pontypool that made headlines in 2020 when a cannabis farm was discovered inside.
SAVE says the register exists to bring forgotten buildings to the attention of new owners or custodians able to repair them — with a basic search free for anyone to browse, nominations welcome from the public at any time, and volunteer photographers sought to document buildings in need of rescue.
Appetite for these buildings is not in doubt — when the same exploring duo who documented the Elysium filmed inside Llanelli’s closed Stradey Park Hotel in June, the story travelled far enough to draw a police warning. The question the register poses is whether that fascination can be turned into rescue.
