Qualla: Ucheldre Centre

Ucheldre Centre: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. Bon Sauveur is a French Catholic teaching order founded in Caen in 1732, dedicated mostly to the deaf and to those with mental illness. Some time in the 1930s the order built a substantial convent on a hill overlooking Holyhead, complete with a chapel in modernised Romanesque style designed by a leading Dublin architect, R. M. Butler. The nuns ran a school there for several decades. By the 1980s the order was in decline, the school had closed, and the buildings were sold to a developer who applied for permission to knock them down. A group of Holyhead residents who could not bear to lose the chapel - the tower of green local stone, the high arched roof, the carved Romanesque detailing - went to the planners, raised money, and bought the building themselves. They opened it in 1991 as the Ucheldre Centre. Holyhead had never had a venue for the arts before. It does now.

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Image: Mx. Granger | CC0

Ucheldre Centre: Saved by the Town

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. 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, in...

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Image: Mx. Granger | CC0

Ucheldre Centre: Kyffin Williams in the Old Chapel

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. 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 Snowdo...

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Image: Mx. Granger | CC0

Ucheldre Centre: Amphitheatre in the Garden

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. 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 caf...

Read more: Ucheldre Centre on Qualla

Image: Mx. Granger | CC0