Oxfam Project

My daughter runs our local Oxfam shop. Oxfam, short for the Oxford Committee on Famine Relief, is a British based charity that works worldwide. People donate various items to be sold in the shops, and every penny of profit goes to fighting famine and poverty worldwide. A couple of weeks ago Phillippa, my daughter, was given a framed pen and ink sketch for the shop, and she was surprised how quickly and how much it sold for.
"Dad," she remarked on her return home, "yours are no worse than that was. How about doing some sketches of buildings in Port Talbot for us? We can frame them up and see if they sell."
Well, with that kind of flattery, how could I refuse.
The initial idea was to produce six different sketches of past and present iconic Port Talbot Buildings. Well, I'd completed the first two and started working on the next, when we sold the first before it even went in the shop.

This was before I'd even scanned it, and so all I have is a hastily taken photograph of it within its frame. This is the art deco Plaza Cinema in Port Talbot. Sadly it has been derelict for a long time now, and despite being listed the interior is in a desperate state. I sketched the cinema as it was for about a decade after I moved here until closure towards the end of the 1990s.

So, as I said, we sold this one while I was making the rest of the sketches. So in the end we decided that I would do another sketch of the Plaza to replace this one. I don't really like repeating sketches, and I was tempted to try from another angle. Still, the fact was that this image of the Plaza had sold, and my daughter really wanted
as close a copy of this as possible. So, putting my 'commission head' on, I resolved to give the 'customer' what she wanted, and produced this version of the same scene. It's obviously not a perfect copy, because I'm not that good - however there is an obvious difference. I changed the film advertised on the large board above the entrance, just so that both pictures have that little bit of individuality.

So altogether, the pictures which actually made it into Oxfam show, the Plaza, which is still standing, after a fashion, a blast furnace in Port Talbot steelworks, which is still standing, Margam Castle, which is still standing, the Miami Beach Funfair in Aberavon Beach, which was removed a good 40+ years ago, and the level crossing in Station Road, which was taken away when the town centre was extensively redeveloped in the late 70s. I've used the scans of the pictures below, rather than photographs of them in their frames:-