The Story
Why we're here.
Wales built more chapels per head of population than almost anywhere in the world. Most of them have become houses. Some became arts centres. A few just fell down. This one didn't do any of those things — it waited.
The building
Capel y Bedyddwyr — the Baptist Chapel of Llanwrtyd Wells — was built in 1877 on Irfon Terrace in a small spa town in mid-Wales. For more than a century it was what Welsh chapels were: a place of worship, yes, but also a place of song, debate, community, and organised dissent.
Then the congregation dwindled, as congregations did everywhere. The chapel closed. The building sat empty. The roof held. The walls held. The building waited.
The chapel facade, Irfon Terrace
Why we’re here
Chapel Wales exists because a group of people looked at that building and saw something that hadn’t finished yet.
What we’re trying to do isn’t complicated: restore the building properly, use it for music and arts and culture, make it a genuine part of the life of the town, and keep it going for the next hundred years. Not a heritage project. Not a tourist attraction. Not a brand. A building doing what it was built to do, which is gather people.
Llanwrtyd Wells is the smallest town in Britain. It has around 600 people, more than its share of pubs, a river, and a tradition of doing unexpected things — the World Bog Snorkelling Championship has been held here since 1986. It doesn’t need us to tell it how to be a community. It needs us to give it a decent room to do it in.
Why a chapel, specifically
Chapels in Wales were never just churches. They were civic spaces: debating halls, concert venues, meeting places. They were where communities gathered not just to pray but to organise, to sing, to argue, to hold power to account. The Welsh choral tradition didn’t come from nowhere — it came from these rooms.
That civic role hasn’t gone away. The buildings that housed it largely have. Chapel Wales is one small attempt to bring a building back to its proper use, in a town that could use it.
Who we are
Chapel Wales is an ongoing project. We’re a small group of people who believe that old buildings and small towns deserve better than what they usually get from culture and development. We’re not a charity yet. We’re not a business yet. We’re somewhere between a conviction and a building site.
We’ll tell you more as we go. That’s what the journal is for.