Newbridge Memo

Celynen Collieries Workmen’s Institute, opened in 1908, originally housed a reading room, billiards room, and library in a two storey building in red and yellow brick with some stone dressings and hipped slated roofs. Alternate bays are gabled on both principal and side elevations and the left hand bay on the principal front is advanced. The Memorial Hall, added in 1924, is taller by a storey, plainer in treatment but in similar materials. The return elevations are in rubble stone. Originally the two buildings were completely separate but a poorly designed and constructed link building of grey brick and concrete was built in the 1960’s to provide improved access. The Memorial Hall auditorium was built as a combined theatre and cinema with a ballroom underneath. Later modernisation of the ballroom and the installation of a bar meant that the original 1920’s dance floor and many of the original art deco features were concealed, including the original ceiling. The first floor Memorial Hall auditorium was designed without curved seating or seating boxes suggesting that it was the needs of a cinema audience that dictated its style, although it did have a gallery to one side of the stage showing that it was built as a professional standard stage. The auditorium is rectangular with a steeply raked stalls floor and a single upper balcony. The segmental vaulted ceiling has oak dados and ornate ventilation extract grilles. The flamboyant rectangular proscenium is flanked by splayed jambs with exit doors and gilded bead-and-reel, acanthus and Greek key mouldings on decorative panels above. Side walls have semi-circular arched windows with ornamental shutters and fanlights. On the piers between the windows are painted roundels and panels, the paintings in the roundels being original. A short flight of stairs leads up to the backstage area where there are two dressing rooms under the stage of the main auditorium which originally benefitted from a pair of high level windows set at pavement level outside, such was the level difference across the site. The projection room above the balcony still had two vintage projectors when the auditorium closed in 1972 and fell into disrepair. The importance of the building as an example of Art Deco architecture meant that the restoration project won significant lottery funding. The Institute was converted for use as a resource centre and the Memo was restored to its former Art Deco grandeur and reopened for use as a cinema, music and theatre in November 2014. A replacement link extension provides a new communal entrance and is designed to contrast with the heavy masonry of the existing buildings.