It closed in 1999 and while there has been much talk of a regeneration plan for the town, including restoring the cinema to its former glory, it has not been backed up with much action. Port Talbot has been in decline for decades.
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Port Talbot’s derelict Plaza Cinema is a boarded-up patchwork of neglect and decay. Even the colourful murals, which adorn the exterior, of the town’s most famous sons – Michael Sheen, Richard Burton and Sir Anthony Hopkins – cannot conceal the broken windows and soot-smudged facade of this once-loved building.
It closed in 1999 and while there has been much talk of a regeneration plan for the town, including restoring the cinema to its former glory, it has not been backed up with much action. Port Talbot has been in decline for decades.
The slow decay of the town has mirrored the slow death of its main industry – steel.
Last week, Tata Steel, which owns the remnants of the formerly state-run British Steel, appeared to sound the death knell for this once mighty industry by putting its loss-making UK assets up for sale. There appears little or no chance of finding a buyer.
British steel plants must be sold within weeks, says Tata
“The works”, as it is known here, is Britain’s biggest steel plant, accounting for more than a third of the country’s 10m tonnes of annual production. But the steel produced here has become uneconomical. A cruel combination of slowing demand, high energy costs and knockdown Chinese competition has sent Britain’s steel industry into what many fear is a terminal decline.
Michael Evans, 71, who worked at the plant for 30 years, sums up the predicament: “Who wants to buy a business that is losing £1m a day?”
With 4,000 jobs under threat at the Port Talbot works, and 15,000 at Tata steel plants around Britain, David Cameron is under intense pressure to step in to save British steelmaking. There are fears that Tata could just pull the plug and walk away within weeks unless a saviour is found. If this happens, Evans says, Port Talbot and the surrounding area would become a near-ghost town of poverty and deprivation.
“Look at what happened when the mines were closed,” he says. “It led to devastation through the valleys and right across south Wales. And when you go there [the valleys] now, nothing has changed.”
The steel veteran’s observation is a poignant one in these parts of south Wales, where families living in former coalmining areas are still cursed by the industry’s poisonous legacy. A report published in 2014 – The State of the Coalfields, commissioned by the Coalfields Regeneration Trust – provides a sobering insight into the continuing struggle of former coalmining communities across Britain.
The UK’s former coalfields are home to 5.5 million people, representing about one in 11 of the country’s population. The report, conducted by Sheffield Hallam University’s centre for economic and social research, found:
It closed in 1999 and while there has been much talk of a regeneration plan for the town, including restoring the cinema to its former glory, it has not been backed up with much action. Port Talbot has been in decline for decades.
