Tinopolis Centre

Image: © Hywel Williams Taken: 19 Sep 2006

This building is the home of Tinopolis, one of the largest independent media production companies in the UK outside London. The building started out life as a Tesco supermarket, complete with its own multi-storey car park, built in the mid 1970s, however with the trend for out of town shopping centres, Tesco built a larger and more modern store on the outskirts of Llanelli in the late 1990s abandoning its town centre building. After lying empty for a couple of years, the building was taken over and extensively refurbished by Tinopolis, converting it into a state of the art studio/office complex. The four large shuttered windows (and one to the side) at the front of the building are windows into a television studio where two daily live welsh language television programmes are recorded and shown on S4C (Wedi 3 and Wedi 7). These are the first studios in the UK to be entirely equipped for producing HDTV programmes throughout the production chain (including tapeless editing) and although the final output on S4C is currently in standard definition, it means that the programme archive is already available in the high definition format. Tinopolis, the company's name is an affectionate nod to Llanelli's nickname in the 19th century when the town was the world's capital of tin plate manufacture.

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