A very modest church and attached parish room, converted from a post-war building used as a café and opened as a church in 1986. Neither the building nor its fittings are of particular heritage interest.

Glynneath is a small mining town in the Vale of Neath and was originally part of the parish of Hirwaun. The parish was served from Aberdare until 1933 when Canon Wall was appointed resident priest at Hirwaun. Mass was said at Glynneath in various centres until 1986, when the parish raised funds to purchase a former café known as the Tudor Grill, which was quickly adapted to provide both a church and a parish room, and was opened for worship in June 1986. The building does not appear on the 1948 Ordnance Survey map, and probably dates from the 1950s, when nearby houses were built.

Description

The building comprises two single-storey rectangular spaces under a continuous pitched roof. The walls are presumably of brick, faced with painted roughcast, and the roof is covered with concrete tiles. The left-hand portion of the building, now the parish room, has a central doorway in the street front, flanked by large rectangular windows which betray the building’s commercial origins. The right hand portion is the church, and has two small rectangular windows in the street front and a central door in the end gable wall.

The church interior is a simple space, with a modern timber floor, plain plastered walls and a suspended ceiling. The windows are clear glazed. There are no fittings of particular note, although the timber benches and Stations of the Cross are probably late nineteenth or early twentieth century in date and were presumably brought from another church.

Heritage Details