The South Wales Islamic Centre, Alice Street, Cardiff was built in the late 1970's in the classical Arabic style by Davies Llewellyn Partnership. The building occupies 250 square metres, and has an impressive bronze dome around which are 16 stained glass windows designed by students of the College of Art, Swansea. The lower parts of the structure are built of red bricks. The building includes a Women's centre, school, and main temple for worship.

Reference: COI photographs and notes, dated 1984.

Political tensions eventually led to the establishment of new Yemeni mosque in Butetown in Alice Street a few hundred metres from the Peel Street Mosque (NPRN 11800). On the site of a former warehouse, Cardiff's second purpose-built mosque and Britain’s fourth was begun in 1967 and opened in 1969. This mosque [1] was designed by Osborne V, Webb, some 20 years after his mosque at Peel Street, but was stylistically a radical modernist departure from the earlier mosque. The Alice Street Mosque was replaced by the South Wales Islamic Centre [2] designed by the Daview Llewelyn Partnership, Cardiff, which opened in 1984.

[1] Shahed Saleem (2018) describes the first mosque in the following terms: 'The Alice Street mosque was determinedly contemporary, reflecting the design influences of post-war British Modernism that had been emerging since the early 1950s. The plan was a simple arrangement of a circular prayer hall, with an offset rectangular two-storey residence linked back to the prayer hall with a single storey entrance lobby. The prayer hall was topped with a concrete shell roof with glazed side panels and glazed flat roof infill sections. This was a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional dome [perhaps influenced by the Bryn Mawr factory], and draws from the heroic Modernist architecture of the 1950s and 1960s. The prayer hall and lobby were rendered, and the residential block brick-faced. The only concessions to traditional Islamic styles were in the detailing of the entrance doors and lobby windows, which had ogee-arched heads. A series of smaller windows in the lobby were triangular, neither strictly traditionally Islamic nor Modernist, but cleverly acceptable to both.' The mosque was architecturally confident - the first modernist exploration of the mosque in Britain - but proved to be inadequate in terms of its plan and was probably poorly constructed. Application was made to demolish the mosque in 1979. There seems to be no photographic record of this mosque but see Shahed Saleem (2018: figs 2.33-2.35) for a block plan, elevations, and computer-generated reconstruction.

[2] The South Wales Islamic Centre replaced the modernist Alice Street Mosque and was designed with some classical Arabic elements by the Davies Llewellyn Partnership. Initially designed with corner turrets a redesigned scheme with central dome was approved in 1981 and opened in 1984. The building occupies 250 square meters with a square prayer hall orientated to Makkah/Mecca, an entrance lobby with ablution facilities, a separate women's prayer hall, and a residential block. The red-brick structure was dominated by the impressive bronze dome over the prayer hall around which are 16 stained glass windows designed by students of the College of Art, Swansea. A minaret was added in 1987 and the mosque was extened in 1989 with the addition of flats and a community centre. The mosque continues to develop, and is admired for its distinctive architecture. it is a focal point for many muslims in Wales and is visited by local schools.

This record was created by RCAHMW’s Welsh Asian Heritage Project (2023–24), funded by the Welsh Government’s Anti-racist Wales Action Plan.

Sources: 

(1) Shahed Saleem, The British Mosque: an Architectural and Social History (Historic England, 2018), pp. 52-6. (2) https://www.theswic.org.uk/about.html (3) https://www.iwa.wales/agenda/2017/10/mosques-in-wales/ (4) https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/2420453/abdul-azim-ma.pdf