IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Stepney Street, LLANELLI, SA15 3UR

Town centre bank branch at 4A Vaughan Street.

A church in Llanelli.

The entrance is in Stepney Street, facing the Vaughan Street junction. The Stepney Precinct leads to Llanelli Market and the St Elli Shopping Centre.

A pedestrianised main shopping street in the town centre.

The closure of Woolies in Llanelli will hit the town harder than most of the closures as all of the big retailers have moved to the nearby out of town retail parks - Woolies was the only large retailer to remain with M&S and WH Smiths opposite closing in the last 12 months or so. A sad loss of a great British institution.

Town centre bank branch at 21 Stepney Street.

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.

A view of Llanelli town centre taken from Tinopolis Centre's roof. Some of the buildings in the foreground look a little derelict and are scheduled for demolition as part of the town's modernisation. The shop in the foreground, originally titled Femme, should probably now be renamed Fermé...

Llanelli's town centre, taken a couple of nights after the Christmas lights were turned on. The picture was taken from the same location as Image

In the early morning of Monday 14th May, the Charcoal Grill became mostly charcoal. Investigations are under way, but it's suspected that the fryer had been left on overnight. The fire appears to have revealed the remains of an awning partially displaying the property's previous name. This shop, based on local memory was Frost Jones, a prestigious seller of fine women's clothing in the mid 20th century. Also, another sign of how the shopping centre of Llanelli has moved from one area to another. The buildings have been deemed unstable and will probably be demolished.