The Conservative Club: Looking for Ghosts in Llanelli

On the first anniversary of the release of his debut Local Fires, Joshua Jones revisits the photographs taken by Nik Roche for the book's potential cover

‘God has shut His doors for the day, has he?’

Nik, Jude and I were gazing at yet another abandoned church in Llanelli. The wind was strong enough to knock our balance, our coats not as waterproof as we had so confidently thought. Jude, a lecturer in photography and Nik’s assistant for the day, clutched the handle of a flimsy umbrella. The wrought-iron railings of the church had, in my memory, always been in the process of shedding their paint. The overgrown grass, a rippling wave in the wind.

There has been more talk of churches today than I thought there would be. The church at the end of my street, where I once took jiu-jitsu lessons in the basement, has since been bought and turned into a home by some photographer from London. Then there’s the church opposite the post office on Ann Street that’s been desolate for over a decade. We count four churches on Church Street – more a cemetery than bustling social space. All of them were closed, either permanently or just today. It’s hard to tell. Sometimes it feels as if dilapidation doesn’t happen gradually, but overnight, or right in front of your eyes.

The back of the Presbyterian Church on the corner of Cowell Street and Stepney Street is opposite the job centre, where the titular character of my story ‘Tommy’ attends AA meetings. The back door of the church, a steel cross on black paint is partially covered by scaffolding. The red brick façade of the YMCA next door remains, while the interior (at the time of writing) was in the process of being gutted, sealed off by a steel fence, ready to become a block of flats.

‘It seems like the only business doing well in Llanelli is the supplier of steel fences’, Nik says. It’s true; the town is covered in demolition sites: the YMCA, the Altalia building, the old Theatre Elli, which I can’t look at without being confronted by childhood memories. I think the last time I sat within its creaking stalls was a screening of Grease when I was in secondary school. Maybe Year 9 or Year 10. I didn’t sing along to a single word when everyone else did, rising out of their seats for every song. I remember feeling particularly sensitive to the perfumed chokehold of the middle-aged Pink Ladies. The Grade-II listed building, its frontage the colour of a cigarette packet, has been pockmarked with fences and scaffolding for over a decade. In the park where St Elli’s Church is situated, we even see a Christmas tree sealed in by steel fence, as if the very idea of Christmas is awaiting demolition. 

I took Nik across swamping fields to look at goalposts chalked onto a brick wall, towards the town end of Station Road, while Jude continued to wrestle with the umbrella under a hunchbacked tree. I told him how these apartment blocks never really had better days, that the population housed within are best avoided; they’re mostly drug-pushers and takers. People as potholed as a Llanelli road. I found myself parroting my parents’ opinions – opinions shared by the wider community. I felt faintly disgusted after this realisation, like I’d witnessed my reflection in the wind-blown mud water of the field we’d just traipsed across. I didn’t know what I truly thought.

The self-convinced parental wisdom, twinned with assured Wales Online articles, fought to dampen any resistance I may have had to the idea that these residential flats are occupied by something more sinister than people just trying to survive. This isn’t a notion I give voice to in my parents’ presence. They think of me as sensitive, that I want to see the good in people. Mostly, they’re right. I want to think of people beyond their given labels, to consider the texture of their lives other than ‘criminal’, or ‘druggie’. I want to consider empathy.

Further along Station Road, Nik remarked how the Home Bargains shop was busier than the high street. A busy, puddled car park contained by a low wall gives the shop an appearance of a private island, a consumerist mecca. The shopping trolleys, caged within each other like a metal Matryoshka Doll, made me depressed. Across the street is the firework shop whose proprietor was the inspiration for Jimmy Pugh, the protagonist of another of my stories, ‘Opportunity Street’. A drinker, womaniser, local con-man — hopefully not much of a reader. The shop, like everything else on this dreary day in the first week of the year, was closed. Rainwater slithered down the profanities graffitied over the steel shutters. Nothing so far had inspired us.

It was Jude’s suggestion that we take pictures against the red metal shutters of a Chinese takeaway. Llanelli Packed Meals – my family’s go-to weekend treat, food whose colour is a diverse range of browns, fried with enough oil to power a mid-sized car. I held the umbrella as Jude helped Nik with his flashgun and light levels. While Jude pondered dog bones in the pungent warmth of a pet shop, Nik and I must have spent a soaked half-hour attempting to get a good shot. Waiting for the road to be cleared of cars between takes dragged out the impromptu shoot. Nik requested that I stride across the road and past the shutters like I had nowhere to walk to and I was pissed off about it. Easy enough. I’d been doing it all day, taking a battering from the wind and cold. I jammed my hands deep into the pockets of my oversized coat, hunched my shoulders as a shield against the rain, the landscape. 

The picture came out better than I could have hoped for. I fell in love with it – which was a welcome surprise, as I generally do not like pictures of myself – ironic, as this photograph only shows the back of me. I don’t mind so much when I’m taking the picture, as I am more in control of the perception of me.

I consider this photograph by Nik a portrait. The hunching of the shoulders, the ears and back of neck the only flesh exposed, the slight shadow closely hugging the body. In this picture I am presented as both part of the landscape and moving away from it. Seemingly haunted by what I am, or what I am attempting to move away from. Unsure of where I am headed, and yet. Stillness.

This photograph was very nearly used as the front cover image for Local Fires. I imagined it cropped so that most of my body would be within the French fold of the cover, with the left side of my body – the foot in motion, the length of my arm and shadow – on the front, appearing as if I am away, or into the book itself. I liked to think of the stories as landscape and I, as well as the reader, flaneurs through its pages. I imagined the left half of the photograph stretching across the back of the cover too, the red and scratchiness of the steel shutters providing texture to sit behind the title texts and blurb.

This photograph wasn’t chosen as the cover image for Local Fires because the publisher wasn’t convinced by its muted colours. They also weren’t sure what the photograph says about the collection as a whole. Well, what does it say? I’m not sure.

I can only say what the image, and the collection, say about me. It might be considered healthy to separate these things from myself. To maintain a distance between myself, the work, and the version of myself contained within the work. But how to strike the right distance between myself and various versions of myself within ‘the work’, and how both of these are perceived by an audience? 

That day in January had not been successful. In the lead up to it I had hoped for a bleary but dry day. I would wander the streets with photographer in tow, sharing tales and memories of the town and my place within them. There were no thoughts for eighty-miles-an-hour winds and abysmal rain. After many email exchanges and design mock-ups, the image above was decided on for the cover, this taken by Nik on a second trip to Llanelli, alone and without near-apocalyptic weather. I think the photographer preferred to work without me insisting on nattering away about empty retail units and unimportant childhood memories. 

On our walk together, Nik had been keen to gain entry into the Con Club – the Llanelli Conservative Club – for a look around. Like everything else, like every pub where we tested the doors, it was closed. A blackness behind the almost-impenetrable frosted windows.

‘What’s there to do here if both the pubs and the churches are closed?’ Nik asked. I wasn’t sure whether he was being facetious or genuine – it was a valid question. I didn’t have an answer either way.

My dad was able to help him gain entry – a colleague at his workplace was a key-holder. Not for any reason, he wasn’t involved with the running of the club, he just drank there a lot. Most of the batch of photographs that Nik took that second day were of the Con Club’s interiors. It was quite a surprise to receive these pictures, as I have never been inside. 

I had heard stories about the Con Club from my dad, of the clientele – most of whom had spent so many days sitting still in their chairs, they’d be covered in a light coating of dust – everywhere except their drinking arm. The voyeur in me was deeply curious to study these images, while I also aware of the shattering of myth. The red bricks and the heavy brown door represented a containment – not that of a zoo, or a prison, but something other. See also: rugby clubs. The pantry shelves of a kitchen at a local caravan park spring to mind– dusty tin cans missed by the prepper’s swipe before the end of the world. This building and what it symbolised – toxic masculinity, the stagnation of ex-industrial towns, the bunker mentality of the drinker generation, exposed within Nik’s images.

The more I look at this photograph, the more questions I have. Who did the medals in the frames belong to? Who is the ghostly portrait of, and who drew it? Why does the solider to the left of Queen Elizabeth have such an enormous head for his body? I don’t want the answers. I don’t want the mystery dispelled. Knowing would bring me closer to the subject, when I am comfortable in my position as a voyeur. I am content to gaze, almost lovingly, at the crooked positioning of the frames, the scratched and bubbling wallpaper. I try to envision the owner of the jacket strewn across the sofa – maybe he’s just out of frame, popped to the loo real quick. I imagine the drinkers among the debris, with flat pints on mouldy coasters, alone on sofa seats, not bothering to turn over the chairs. Just clear a small circle of dust off the table for their drink. I bet this place has its fair share of ghosts.

One of the biggest surprises I felt upon receiving the photographs from Nik was that the Con Club has a stage. Porthcawl, a 40-50 minute drive from Llanelli on the M4, has the world’s biggest Elvis festival outside of Graceland, attracting over 30,000 people every year, apparently. You just know some of South Wales’ finest Elvis-impersonators have performed on the stage at the Con Club. I bet they have nostalgia on tap here, right next to the bitter. The jagged lines and white lines remind me of Elvis glamour, so plastically replicated in Amazon-bought costumes.

It’s undoubtedly a sad scene – pathetic too, like a caged bird finally allowed freedom, only to fly straight into a window. My eye is drawn to the grey bucket by the stairs to the stage, and without a mop. I consider its function. Is it in use for a bin? Ready to serve as a sick bowl when the ghostly inhabitants have had too many pints of dusty nostalgia? The sad excuse for a DJ station – tables that look like they’ve been looted from a skip outside a school, another closed under the Conservative government’s budget cuts, and that laughable sound system. The stack of CDs, mess of wires, the fan with its face against the wall – one solitary disposable facemask hanging down the back of the table. 

How much of all this detail did Nik see before he took the photograph – how long did he work to get the angle right? My understanding of Nik is that he is a silent observer. A hunter, looking and listening out for the animal of his interest. His images pull the viewer’s eyes in unnatural directions, from one object to the next. Often I find myself reaching a feeling of passive anxiety – safe in my bedroom while gazing at the images on my laptop or phone, my eyes darting from, in this case, the bin to curtains to tables and stacked amps. I am not at ease. I would like to know how Nik felt, stalking the Con Club for images, and how he felt when viewing this scene.

The quietest photo of the series is perhaps the most sorrowful —two chairs and a table, a wheelchair facing the window, all unoccupied. The window is without a view, only a suggestion of shape and colour through the glaze. The scene is contained within itself, tense with static. Who would drink here, in some forgotten corner of the Con Club? It has the same sense of liminality as does a fire escape route, the backrooms of a shopping centre, but simultaneously it feels lived in – the corners of the flyer on the corkboard curling inwards, the chairs facing each other as if their occupants have only popped to the bar, might be back any second. 

It’s this tension of the lived-in space, the stark emptiness left behind by the figure in motion, like a ghost on the move, that I feel really captures my desire to write Local Fires. I have a preoccupation with space – how I and others, fictional or otherwise, navigate physical space while simultaneously navigating internal (emotional, mental) space.

I may not be a hunter, like the photographer with his camera, but I sometimes feel like I can see ghosts – how they navigate through time and space. Everyone is a ghost until I touch their skin, every building too. The Con Club is another abandoned church — in the process of abandonment. There’s no real difference between church and pub, abandoned or not. When the dilapidation happened also doesn’t matter, nor the fact that it did. What does matter, is that people were here — and they continue to be.

Joshua Jones (he/him) is a writer and multidisciplinary artist from Llanelli, South Wales, now based in Cardiff. Local Fires was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize 2024. He has written for Cwlwm previously and led a Cwlwm workshop in Llanelli in January 2024.