Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre will be 50 years old this weekend and, as Martin Wade finds out, it has served as an oasis of calm and creativity amid the bustle of Cwmbran.

LONG before Cwmbran had been built, before industry came, the house has stood here. Once a farmstead attached to the nearby abbey and later a family home, it has long been place both of contemplation and industry. For the last 50 years it has been known as centre for arts, but surviving that long has not been easy.

Hywel Pontin, director of Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre, said it had been through a "rollercoaster" of public funding over the past fifty years. "There were moments when we've come close to shutting down, but we've always managed to hang on."

He is realistic about the challenges the arts centre has faced and will continue to: "Looking across Wales, politicians are under pressure and we will see cuts hitting us first. We're under no illusion about the strain they're under."

The centre was opened in 1966 by the then MP for Leo Abse. Equally at home in the arts or the earnest business of parliamentary politics, the free-thinking Pontypool MP would surely have approved of how the centre has developed with one eye on its finances and one on the creative world.

The foundations of the centre originally supported a 12th century farmhouse, called Gelli Las, meaning Green Grove’ in Welsh. Nearby Llantarnam Abbey had fourteen monastic farms or granges of which it was one. The industrious Cistercian order cleared swathes of forest and made the area a hive of productivity.

Abse’s successor Torfaen MP Nick Thomas-Symonds said that the place offers a ‘certain breathing room for the spirit’ – and the site has always provided a haven in the middle of town. This very ancient building gives this breathing room surrounded by modernity. As the new town of Cwmbran grew around it, it too changed.

After it was worked as a farm, it was the family home of William Thomas Jones, the Managing Director of Avondale Tinplate Works. But there was no certainty that it would become the thriving hub we see today.

The work to create the town centre we see in Cwmbran today began in 1956. Little by little, the grounds of Gelli Las were eaten away. First the bus station was built on top of the kitchen garden, a car park was built over the orchard, which is where the Vue Cinema stands today.

Lucas Girlings took over the lease of the house in 1958 and using it as a drawing office. They left in 1964 and the building was set to be demolished.

The manager of the corporation overseeing Cwmbran’s expansion suggested that Llantarnam Grange could become a meeting place for societies and clubs. A place like this was seen as vital to help give a heart and a soul to the new town.

Renovating the building cost nearly £12,000 and on 30th April 1966 Llantarnam Grange Societies Club was officially opened.

So how have they survived since then? As befits a place of creativity, they have had to be inventive. "We've had to broaden our funding - so we opened the cafe, hired out rooms, we have a craft retail section." Hywel says.

The centre no longer uses the post to send out promotional material. "It costs 60p to post a letter, but a tweet or Facebook post costs almost nothing." More money has been saved by moving exhibition catalogues online. "It would cost us around £3,000 to print 300 copies of a catalogue. Now we put it on the web." The results have been a revelation. The online promotion for a recent exhibition for 'On My Mother's Knee' - a study of art and craft taught by parents and grandparents - was seen by 15,000 people around the world. "That reach was something we just couldn't get before - and it would only cost around £150."

"We are more self-sufficient now" he adds, saying: "Of our £250,000 per year income, over half of that is self-generated."

But of course it isn't just about the money - essential though it is to know how it is being made for the centre to survive.

The centre’s exhibitions come from a variety backgrounds. Over the past decades, they’ve hosted the work of South Wales potter Morgen Hall whose works were displayed under the heading ‘The breakfast, lunch and dinner party’. One of their most popular, the 1994 exhibition toured the UK and brought her to a huge audience.

Another exhibition by Katharine Morling showed her porcelain sculptures of everyday objects as monochrome three-dimensional drawings. Hywel says these are typical of the work the centre shows and are not 'high-brow' but can be enjoyed on many levels.

"People use the centre in many different ways” he adds, “They come in for a cup of tea, to buy a card, or to look at the exhibits, or all three. We want things to be challenging yet accessible – everything is of equal importance.”

"We could put on esoteric shows for the kudos that would bring, but we wouldn't be relevant to the local people we serve.” Without the 60,000 visitors they get every year, he admits “we'd be nothing”.

On the day I talk to him, the centre is bustling by 9.30am. "There is an art project called 'Living with Dementia' meeting in one of the centre's rooms, people are knitting in the cafe and we've got a local art club here this afternoon and Torfaen Communities First groups will be meeting here tomorrow”, he tells me.

When they saved the building in 1966, they were looking for a community hub - a focus for cultural activity, and that is emphatically what it has become.

The nature of the building lends it to certain uses. It was built as a home and the activities, housed in former rooms, tend to be on a smaller, intimate scale. "We're not trying to be something we're not" says Hywel.

This haven of calm among the bustle of a busy shopping town has survived and thrived for fifty years and longer and Hywel sees reassurance in this. "In 50 years’ time, maybe the Morrisons and the Vue Cinema will be gone but we'll still be here."