St Fagans National History Museum, Cardiff - December 28, 2018
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.
Construction 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 was reconstructed at St Fagans two years later.
