Manalo & White has converted a Bangor church into Nyth, a new home for Welsh language theatre company Frân Wen, which has allowed it to turbocharge its social mission
Half-lost in the driving rain, Bangor University’s Arts Building still cuts an imposing figure from its hill. Designed by Henry Hare, its library, hall and squat tower of dark Cefn stone are blurrily framed against the backdrop of the Menai Strait and the Irish Sea’s insinuated broadness beyond.
The road to Frân Wen, a Welsh language theatre company, runs along the foot of its escarpment, the long, austere face of the Collegiate Tudor building glaring down before the taxi turns east down a narrow lane to finally meet the brightly lit west window of the former St Mary’s Church, now Frân Wen’s Nyth building. You’d expect its rubble walls to be running below supporting this expanse of 19th-century stained glass. Instead, a proscenium arch of steel and cut stone not only creates a bright, welcoming, glazed entrance but intimates the nature of its new iteration. A supersize letter fills each of four full-height glazed panels, boldly evident as the driver pulls up. ‘Never been down this road – what is it?’ he asks curiously. ‘It’s the home of a Welsh theatre company,’ I reply. ‘I see,’ he says. ’Nyth – that’s a nice name for it,’ he says. ‘It means nest.
Frân Wen creative director Gethin Evans and executive director Nia Jones are sitting in a cosy and warm but currently quiet kitchen area, as I recount this interaction. ‘Taxi drivers have turned out to be a curious way for getting our message out to the community,’ says Evans. ‘During our Olion production – let’s call it a Welsh Punch Drunk, set across the whole of Bangor – actors and creatives were turning up in cabs for rehearsals and it felt like there was suddenly a growing understanding of what we do here.’
What it isn’t, he stresses, is just a theatre. ‘I describe this place as a lab where communities and artists can try stuff, using theatre as a way to explore, experiment and discover, and via that process, to make work. When it’s ready, off they go out of this building to their schools, localities or the touring network.’
Nyth has been designed by architecture practice Manalo & White, well-seasoned in low-budget arts projects, and it feels as though, from the outset, Frân Wen sought to embed itself in its community’s social history.
Putting on a production the size and ambition of Olion didn’t just appear like the rain. Jones explains that Frân Wen ‘was started in 1984 by five actors as a Welsh-language theatre and education company, liaising with local schools to put on plays, albeit in a “didactic” way’. But steady growth saw it become a charity in 1995, helped by a handy but ill-suited Anglesey base. Soon, it would come to the attention of Arts Council Wales, which, says Jones, ‘was keen to encourage more creativity and interaction and enable it to do its own shows as well as schools’ outreach’. As she summarises their 2018 drive to secure more funding on the back of its own £600,000 pot, it becomes clear to me how pivotal Jones was in making the case for the investment that would allow Frân Wen to turbocharge its social mission.
An initial £1.8 million Arts Council Wales grant was augmented by the Welsh government’s Transforming Towns drive, with more funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund among others and just over half a million pounds became nearly £5 million. Well before this was secured, the aim was that the charity should regenerate a building in this small but culturally significant university city. HP Horner’s Grade II-listed Gothic church had been abandoned since 2014 but, along with its church yard, was purchased in 2019 by the charity for £150,000. Since opening, Nyth has been a home for schools and local arts and support groups. But Evans points out that its social impact isn’t just with community cohesion and upskilling kids, but with over 280 artist freelancers using it too ‘as one of the key producers of professional theatre in Wales’.
Engaging with Manalo & White was, says Jones, ‘hugely inspiring and productive’. Evans spent his first day in his role interviewing the shortlisted architects with her. What the project manager saw as Manalo & White’s ‘unorthodox’ tender document, which he had to point out, only piqued the interest of a client used to unorthodox approaches of its own. ‘Other presentations seemed a bit lazy by comparison,’ recalls Evans. ‘The work they showed us was curious and quirky, and we knew we wanted something playful and dynamic born out of a genuinely collaborative design process.'
The practice didn’t disappoint. Cleared of its pews, the nave and side aisles of old church have been transformed into a single open rehearsal and performance space, the self same pews deconstructed and turned into timber wall linings for the space and low-level seat storage. A state-of-the-art adjustable lighting rig meanwhile, hangs (and slides!) from the trussed timber roof above a new timber sprung floor (aisle ceramic tiles have been reused elsewhere). Architect Takuya Oura agonised over acoustic wall lining panels, whose lovely scalloped form, inspired by removed organ pipes, optimised sound attenuation. Meanwhile, ‘reverse’ faces, cut from the same foam, line kitchen area walls, helping save on the contract sum. Dealing with equipment became a no-brainer. What was mooted to be a chancel workshop area was, due to difficult stepped level changes, turned into a storage space, separated from the nave by another one of the huge black curtains that elegantly compartmentalise the space.
Oura worked with theatre designer Plann on the complex labyrinth duct attenuation on mezzanine side walls for the passive heating and ventilation strategy. This, together with double-skin, fair-faced, locally sourced block walls and crafted steel secondary glazing, lets Frân Wen go big on sound without disturbing local residents.
The biggest intervention, however, was the radical proposal to dig out and underpin below the west window, to create a double-height space that not only resolves the accessibility requirement in one move but unifies it with the former ‘ground’ level and existing, stepped south porch. Sizeable bi-parting doors beneath that steel and stone proscenium now lead into a large entrance with lift and meeting room/green room beyond; and, to the north, level access to the church’s old cellar, which, with its exposed rubble walls, has been converted into a new workshop space. In the entrance, a huge single pier of rubble stone marks the position of one of the church’s columns, above. Jones still recalls being aghast when she first saw huge diggers clawing away brutally at the ground below the window’s tracery, wondering if they had made a serious error. No one thinks that now; the connectivity and creative potential this realised has been transformational. Evans is convinced the dark, dungeon-like nature of the cellar space alone informs how actors choose to express themselves within it.
It’s the most exciting space I’ve ever worked in given how it seems to enable everyone who uses it
The MacEwen Award judges acknowledged this intellectual rigour when they chose to highly commend Nyth. ‘The architect struck a balance by confidently responding to the brief with an elegant intervention that doesn’t compete with the church architecture,’ said judge Mike Worthington, while Kathy MacEwen noted: ‘They seem to have truly worked with and listened to its young people to create a something special for them.’
Evans would like to add to that, describing his excitement catching the buzz in the kitchen area with all the different groups that might be might be in Nyth at any one time. ‘I’ve never been in a building like it,’ he says. ‘It’s the most exciting space I’ve ever worked in given how it seems to enable everyone who uses it. There’s nothing like it in Wales, and I know work produced here this year could not have been made without it. The artists and young people love it.’
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In numbers
Construction cost £2.97 million
Total area 705m2
Cost per m2 £4,213
Credits
Client Frân Wen
Architect Manalo & White
Structural engineer engineersHRW
M&E engineer Collaborate + Create
Quantity surveyor Pulse Consult
Project manager SP Projects
Main contractor Grosvenor Construction
Fire engineer Allwedd
Heritage consultant Dave Jump
Theatre consultant Plann
Access consultant Access Included
Landscape consultant Tirlun Barr
BREEAM consultant Encon Associates
Art and inclusivity co-ordinator The DisOrdinary Architecture Project
Artist Robin Edward