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Oakdale Workmen's Institute

Person / Body: Jones, Richard (From Caerphilly)

The Oakdale Workmen's Institute was built in 1917 to serve as a focus for social, educational and cultural life within the newly established coal mining community there. It was funded by a loan from the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company, which the miners then repaid over the following years. The building contains a Library, Reading Room, and Committee Room on the ground floor, and two small offices for the Institute's Secretary and Manager. A Concert Hall, originally seating more than 200 people, occupies the whole of the first floor. A separate, but linked, Billiards Room was housed in a flat-roofed building behind the Institute, on top of which (in 1927) was built a larger public hall, which was later adapted for use as a cinema. The Institute closed in 1987 and two years later the building was dismantled and transported to St Fagans. The cinema was too large for the site and was not moved.

Workmen's Institute, designed by A.F. Webb, . M.S.A. for the Oakdale Workmen's Institute Committee; initial funding was provided by the Tredegar Iron & Coal Co. in the form of a loan which was repaid by 1945; building comprised: reading room, committee room & library on ground floor, together with toilets, foyer, entrance lobby and two offices, staircase leads to first floor concert hall and two ante-rooms; boiler house and store at back of building not original feature.