Historic Renovation Project

In 2020, Awen Cultural Trust and their partners began a multi-million pound restoration of Maesteg Town Hall.

They wanted to document the progress of the project from start to finish, and so approached us at Hammerspace to produce a series of video blogs spaced out over the duration of the project.

Each video would need to capture a key stage of the hall's development, to be shown on the Awen website, and also serve to keep local residents informed through social media. This meant there was a requirement to produce the videos in both landscape and square formats.

Our ambition for the town hall vlogs was not just to show the development work, but also provide some history about the building, and it's historic importance to the local area. The hall was once the hub of the community in the mining days, with the local miners even once all volunteering a day's wages to help fund the upkeep of the hall.

This history and strong link with the surrounding community became a core focus of the vlogs. In this final vlog, you can see a strong narrative from all parties about how the redevelopment is celebrating the history of the building and of Maesteg, while also providing new modern updates to the building which will serve the community into the future.

The town hall project fell victims to extensive delays, primarily caused by the COVID pandemic, which disrupted the project timescale, and what we initially set out to be an 18 month project ended up taking five years to complete! Nevertheless, Awen Cultural Trust remained flexible and committed, determined to see the project through to the end. We mirrored that commitment to the video documentary side of the project, and the end results are extremely satisfying to see. Some of the footage even got broadcast on ITV News!