Ucheldre means simply high town in Welsh, the name of the hill the convent sits on. The chapel that became the centre's main hall is one of R. M. Butler's better small church designs - he was responsible for a long list of public buildings in Ireland in the early 20th century, including the original Carnegie libraries in Dublin and Cork. The building uses a great deal of the distinctive green Anglesey stone, which weathers to a soft grey-green; the tall square tower can be seen from across the town. Inside, the original arched chapel roof is now the ceiling of a 200-seat performance space. The acoustic, the volunteers will tell you, is unusually good for music; the height and the curve do most of the work. When the centre took over in 1988, the chapel was structurally sound but stripped of fittings; the conversion left as much of the original architecture intact as possible while adding what a working arts centre needs: a gallery wing, a restaurant, dressing rooms, a small box office.

The exhibition programme has, over more than three decades, gone considerably further than a town of Holyhead's size might be expected to support. Sir Kyffin Williams, the most prominent Welsh landscape painter of the 20th century and a man whose thickly-trowelled views of Snowdonia hang in every major British museum, lived nearby on Anglesey and exhibited at Ucheldre several times before his death in 2006. The centre has shown national touring exhibitions, large-scale sculpture in the grounds, and an annual programme of work by contemporary Welsh artists. The Prince of Wales Award was given to the centre in recognition of the original restoration work. On Friday and Saturday film nights, the main hall doubles as a cinema; the programme runs from current Hollywood releases to subtitled European films, an unusually catholic offering for a small Welsh town.

Outside, the convent's old gardens have been landscaped into an unexpectedly ambitious outdoor space. There is a small grass amphitheatre for summer performances, with the stone of the chapel as a backdrop. Local sculptors have placed work among the paths. In good weather the cafe spills out onto the lawn, and on a warm August evening the town will turn up for an outdoor concert or play with the kind of communal goodwill that small-town arts venues generate when they have been built from below rather than imposed from above. There is no large endowment behind Ucheldre, no major arts council bricks-and-mortar grant. It runs on ticket sales, membership, small grants, and a great deal of volunteer time, and it has been doing so for over thirty-five years. The building it occupies might have come down in 1990; instead it is still here, still in use, still the only place in north-west Anglesey where a Holyhead resident can see a Friday-night film in a converted nineteenth-century convent chapel.