PORT TALBOT: Inside the exhibition documenting a town after steelmaking

A steelworker in a heat mask, silhouetted against a wall of molten glare. A terraced street of red brick with the blast furnaces rising over the chimney pots at the end of it.

Both are hanging at The Plaza in Port Talbot this week, in an exhibition about what happened to the town when the furnaces went quiet.

Steeling Ourselves opened on Friday evening and runs until 7 August.

It pairs photographs by Jon Pountney with the words of residents interviewed about the closure and what has followed it.

One of them talks about the noise, and what it meant to lose it.

“I like the noises from it. The thunder, you know the charging and all that’s gone and that was the backdrop to my childhood,” they said. “Everyone in Port Talbot, even if you don’t live in Taibach or Margam, everyone knows them sounds.”

Then the line that lands hardest. “There’s a lot of change. We’re kind of a bit boring now and bit like everywhere else.”

Another interviewee refuses the idea that the town is finished. “You can live the dream from Port Talbot. We’ve insisted upon that and the fact that we’re still surviving 10 years later, living quite well and being creative and doing all these positive things, shows that it’s actually true.”

Photographs of a town, not of a closure

Pountney’s pictures are not all furnaces and fire. Three lads mess about on the coast road with the harbour cranes behind them. Women sit in camping chairs on the sea wall. A woman pushes a pram along an empty tideline with the docks in the far distance.

The works themselves mostly appear at a remove, hazy behind dune grass, or framed at the end of an ordinary street.

One photograph is of a garage wall painted with a warning about polluted air, and a caption reading “Look dad it’s a Banksy”, answered with “No it’s a John Brandler son”. Locals will get it. Brandler is the art dealer who bought Banksy’s Season’s Greetings after it appeared on a Taibach garage in 2018, and who took it out of the town in 2021 to be displayed in Peterborough.

A town that keeps making art out of what it lost

That mural is part of a pattern. Port Talbot has spent the years since the closure announcement producing culture at a rate that has started to get noticed well outside it.

A former steelworker, Cassius Walker-Hunt, opened Portablo Coffee in Aberavon after leaving the industry, naming it in the tradition of the town’s street art.

Sir Anthony Hopkins, now 88, signed a record deal for an album drawing on his 1940s Margam childhood, its first single named after a road he grew up near.

And the town is on the shortlist for the first UK Town of Culture, one of 15 picked from 398 bids, with £3m attached and one Welsh rival in the same category.

Research, not just art

Steeling Ourselves is part of a research project called After the End, which studies how communities live through endings, and the questions of memory, resilience, identity and power that come with them.

It is led by Professor Patricia Kingori at the Ethox Centre, Oxford Population Health, with Professor Ruth Ogden of Liverpool John Moores University and Professor Laura Salisbury of the University of Exeter. Funding comes from Wellcome, LJMU and Exeter.

The researchers say they want it to feed into wider arguments about the social cost of industrial change, and to keep local voices in the conversation about what regeneration should look like.

What the exhibition is arriving into

That conversation is busy. Tata’s £1.25bn electric arc furnace has been fabricated and shipped, though the project has been hit by delays over its grid connection, with one former Aberavon MS warning it may not run until autumn 2028.

A green jet fuel plant planned for the town was scrapped outright, with the loss of the blast furnaces among the reasons it stopped adding up. In June, a fire tore through the Cold Mill and burned into a second day.

For the people rather than the plant, there is Shaun Young, made redundant from the coke ovens and now inspecting bolted joints across south Wales, and a youth hub that has just taken £250,000 to put job help, housing support and routes into green industry under one roof.

The Plaza itself is part of the same story. The Grade II listed former cinema on Talbot Road was converted into a community hub and business centre, a project that won an all-Wales award.

The exhibition can also be seen online at aftertheend.org/exhibition.

Author

Kit Peters

Kit Peters is a journalist and the editor of Swansea Bay News, covering Swansea, Neath Port Talbot and Carmarthenshire since 2020.