Ken Marten

In early 2020, I lived in Vienna but returned to Port Talbot to work as a florist at The Flower Box during the busy Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day periods. Before I could return to Austria, Wales went into lockdown, and my flight was cancelled.

The shop closed to the public, but we continued taking telephone and online orders. Funeral tributes had to be arranged remotely, and when I delivered them to homes, I often had to leave them in front gardens. At a time when people could not visit one another or attend the funerals of those they loved, flowers sometimes stood in for hugs and kisses.

While delivering across Port Talbot and the Afan Valley, I kept my camera close at hand to document eerily empty roads, closed venues, and taped-off playgrounds, all resembling scenes from a dystopian science fiction film.

Though I wasn’t intentionally making a lockdown documentary, I photographed whatever caught my eye. The unique circumstances inevitably influenced these pictures.

Now, six years later, these photographs not only evoke a landscape of life interrupted but also one reshaped by the fallout of Covid-19.

“Funerals will continue to be held but only with close family present.”
— Mark Drakeford, First Minister of Wales, 23 March 2020

Margam Crematorium, February 2020. I photographed it on a cold, frosty morning, before the first lockdown. In the months that followed, attendance at funerals here was restricted, leaving many relatives and friends unable to attend or say goodbye in person. Margam recorded 1,694 cremations during 2020, 208 more than the previous year.

Floral tributes near Margam Knuckle Yard for Gareth Delbridge and Michael Lewis, Network Rail workers killed near Port Talbot in July 2019. Taken on 26 March 2020.

“On Google Earth I’m always going back to Bracken Road. Press a button and you’re outside the house where you’re born.”

— Anthony Hopkins

The Plaza Cinema was built in 1939 and opened the following Easter. The last film shown was The Prince of Egypt, screened on 4 January 1999; when I photographed the building twenty-one years later, it was still a derelict shell. Michael Sheen, who had watched films there as a child, returned to its story in the 2017 radio documentary Port Talbot Paradiso, asking whether an abandoned cinema could be given another life. Unlike several of the buildings in this series, it survived—reopening in 2023 as the New Plaza community hub.

Port Talbot Naval Social Club. The club had stood at the northern end of Aberavon Beach since at least the early 1970s. It later became the rehearsal base for Michael Sheen’s The Passion and a filming location for Steeltown Murders. The property was sold in 2025; by the following year, it was in council ownership, and demolition began at the end of September 2026.

The Royal British Legion Club, Port Talbot, 2020. Bingo was played upstairs and snooker downstairs, with regulars returning to the same seats week after week. The club survived the pandemic but closed in 2025, after around ninety years in the town.

“Port Talbot … is literally overlooked. Most experience the town while flying over it on the M4, held aloft by concrete stilts planted in terraced streets.”

— Jasper Rees, Made in Port Talbot