Risk List

Penallta Pithead Baths and Canteen, Caerphilly

Status: At risk

Miners’ Welfare Committee Architects, 1938
Threat: Dereliction

Described upon opening as ‘the finest and biggest pithead baths in the country’, Penallta is one of only two Grade II* listed Pithead Baths (along with those at Chatterley Whitfield in Stoke-on-Trent) and stands as perhaps the most important surviving International Modern movement building in Wales.
First introduced in the 1920s at collieries across Britain, Pithead Baths allowed coal miners to wash at work before returning home, serving in excess of half-a-million workers on a daily basis and delivering widespread health and welfare benefits some two decades before the founding of the NHS. Mandated by the Miners’ Welfare Committee, designed by their in-house architects, and funded by state-legislated levies on coal production and profits, they were an unprecedented progressive building programme which acted as a powerful propaganda tool for the wider coal mining industry.

Penallta Colliery was closed by British Coal in November 1991 after 86 years of operation, it was the last deep mine working in the Rhymney Valley. A site-wide outline planning permission for conversion to residential usage was granted as long ago as 1999, and some other surviving buildings at the former colliery have been successfully conserved and converted in recent years by the developer Penallta Heritage, backed by Greystone Capital. A glossy investment brochure issued in 2021 advertised 33 apartments within the Bath House, stressing their suitability as holiday lets and accompanied by visualisations of a fully restored building.

These plans have since stalled and the baths complex remains in a semi-derelict state, the two-storey water tower and elegant projecting streamlined canteen now bricked-up and barely visible. Caerphilly Council are currently considering issuing a Repairs or Urgent Works Notice on the owner of the building. Meanwhile in 2024, a team from Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University began an extensive surveying and design project at Penallta, exploring sustainable futures for former industrial sites. Without urgent attention, it may soon pass from restoration-ready to ruin.

How to help

Write to Caerphilly Council Conservation and Design team to urge action: planning@caerphilly.gov.uk

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