What The New Book Is All About



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Real Cardiff The Flourishing City by Peter Finch is published by Seren Books and is available in bookshops.  Copies can also be ordered directly from the publisher.
 
Real Cardiff the Flourishing City shows us where we now are.  Change is rolling in the Welsh capital.  Population is again increasing – 328,200 in 2007, 367,000 in 2017 and a predicted 412,801 by 2026. The building boom, slowed by the financial crash of 2008, is again roaring at full strength.  Towers of purpose built student accommodation towers rush skywards everywhere.  Central Square is full of new build housing the BBC, the School of Journalism, HMRC and a host of law firms. Wales’ tallest building, easily seeing off Swansea’s Meridian Tower,  is proposed for Custom House Street, opposite the Golden Cross.The same developer is building another giant at the end of Charles Street.  Along Park Place the University are removing Victoriana to create a space age student welcome centre almost as big as City Hall.  On the site of the Duke of York by the rail link Premier Inns are building a new hotel. Out at St Mellons Cardiff Parkway, a giant new rail station, conference centre, parking lot with shopping malls, accommodation and offices is about to come into being.

250 of Peter Finch's photographs to accompany the book can be viewed (in high-def if you want) here.



Change in the Bay - Where Else?

Down the Bay the Navy are constructing a vast training centre while apartment developers continue to construct huge blocks with sea views to die for.  The green lands or what's left of them that once lined the M4 are now filling with new housing estates.  A new metro integrated transport system will follow, they say. In the inner city there isn't a scrap of brownfield that isn't either being developed or has plans to be. Is all this good for us?
In this  flourishing city Peter Finch walks, talks, discovers and delves.  He follows the central rock and roll axis, fights the battle for the Vulcan, recalls the Charles Street Carnival, finds traces of Penylan’s lost mansions and Roman Quarry, magics the psychic centre north of the Castle out of plain air.  He celebrates the Bay’s Baltimore origins, tours the biggest roundabout in the Western world, is there when Captain Video lands in Victoria Park, sales again with Captain Scott, finds trolley buses hidden on the flatlands, walks the coast path, tours the mosques, works out where Canton ends, demystifies the Masons, rides all of Cardiff’s extant railways, stands on every one of its 20 stations,  uncovers the capital's true relationship with Caerphilly and the valleys north, and then eats his way right down City Road. All this and a huge amount more that you didn’t know about the Welsh capital surface in Seren's Real Cardiff The Flourishing City, presented inimitable psychogeographic style.  With Finch’s rich mix of recollection, discovery, research, opinion  and anecdote the new work is his best yet.


You want to find out where the Real city is, where its past went,   and what the capital now does?  Look no further.  It’s all here.




Real Cardiff The Flourishing City is published by Seren Books, 2018. Paperback.  £9.99.  ISBN 9781781724699

Cardiff has felt like this quite a few times in its long history. And today it’s feeling like this all over again.

Boom towns stimulate.  Living in them we get a sense of excitement, of furiously going somewhere, of being something.  Cardiff has felt like this quite a few times in its long history. And today it’s feeling like this all over again.

I’m on the harbour front in the Bay seeing some of the best of it. Europe’s most liveable capital city[1], and, since 2016, the one with the greatest increase in popularity as a destination[2].  It’s here all around me. New build still happening in all directions. Ten years back, following the impounding of the waters by the Barrage and the opening of both the Senedd and the Wales Millennium Centre, I asked a local developer if the Bay was now complete. Not for another twenty years, he told me, there’s space and opportunity enough here for at least that. 


Booms arrive at places where opportunity presents itself, where money can be turned, where great fortunes can be amassed overnight. All you need is the suggestion that this is happening and the rush will begin.


Cardiff's new horizon

Before the Romans arrived here in AD 55 to build their fort on the Severn shore the locals, the Silures, had a couple of huts, some fishing henges, and a place to launch boats. But the needs of the invaders presented opportunity. First a village and then a town accumulated as natives learned to offer the services that the Roman garrison commander did not. Food, drink, entertainment, women.  Cardiff boomed. 

Not that the place was called Cardiff then. The Romans knew it as Tamium, a name they also used for the river. However, the Antonine Itinerary, the third century survey of the Roman Empire’s roads, lists this thriving fort and village as Bovium. Nomenclature is unclear. The twelfth century Liber Landavensis[3], The Book of Llandaff, suggests that the river might have at one time been called the Tâm. There is fog. I love that.

The whole habitation, of course, could have been called Roath, a village a short distance east of the Taff estuary. I suggested this to much derision in Real Cardiff. It’s an idea that legendary Cardiff historian and compiler of the Cardiff Records, J. Hobson Matthews, proposed back in 1901[4]. I see from my latest council tax demand that the idea has not caught on.

Cardiff’s booms of the dark ages, if it had any, go largely unrecorded. By 1262, almost two hundred years after the Norman invasion and more than seven hundred after the Romans had left, the population of Kardivia[5] had climbed from the few hundred who must have lived in Bovium to a dizzying 2020. The Black Death of 1348 and the rampaging of Owain Glyndŵr then knocked that  back to around 1200. This was a collapse, a great shrinkage, when Kerdif’s early High Streete, East Streetwardee, West Streete and South Streete[6] between them could only house as many as walk round Roath Park Lake on a hot bank holiday. 

By 1801, the date of the first census, the population of market traders and sheep skin exporters at what had now become known as Cardiff had crawled up again to 1870. If you included outlying villages such as Roath, Lisvane and Llandaff, however, then the figure would hit 3427[7]. Not a huge number by contemporary standards but it was a new clustering of people. The Glamorgan Canal, which had first reached the sea near the present Clarence Road Bridge in 1794, had a lot to do with this fresh and soon to become unstoppable blossoming.

The root lay with the industrial revolution and the manufacture of first iron and then steel at the heads of the south Wales valleys. This was closely followed by the mining of coal, on what turned out to be an epic scale, right down those valleys. Without these newly flourishing commodities the boom of the town just beyond the valleys’ southern extremity would never have happened.

By 1851, with the Glamorgan Canal full of barges, Bute’s first dock functioning, and the Taff Vale Railway bringing down ceaseless trucks of steam coal and iron ingots, the Cardiff population had risen by more than sevenfold to 26,630. This was what former First Minister the late Rhodri Morgan calls the heroic period. The rocky path to Welsh supremacy, in terms of population numbers anyway, had now become a rolling road. By 1901 that population had swollen to 172,629. By 1951 it had reached  267,356. From a village where everyone would have known everyone else to a city where you could have an affair and get away with it in less than a hundred and fifty years. I made this suggestion to a group of local citizens gathered in Penarth a few years back. There was a small silence and then a woman at the back put her hand up. “On, no you can’t”, she said.

Population growth since the nineteen fifties has continued. Perhaps not at the scale witnessed during the great industrial age but in fits and great bursts nonetheless. In 2001 Cardiff was 292,150.  Six years later, just before the financial crash, it had risen by more than 10% to 328,200[8]. Certainly a place big enough to get lost in, but still eminently knowable.  

More recent population figures are harder to settle on. Estimates put the city at 358,400 in 2016 with continuing growth at well above the national average projected for the decade to come.  Cardiff’s Local Development Plan[9] for the period is predicated on a population that will top 412,801[10] by 2026. This figure does have an element of elasticity about it, however, and has been challenged  a number of times. But whichever way it’s looked at it remains a substantial figure.





[1] Cardiff Council’s current promotional slogan.
[2] Data from travel search engine Kayak shows that Cardiff’s popularity as a holiday destination has more than tripled since 2016 with an increase of 223%.
[3] Liber Landavensis or Llyfr Llandaf, the Book of Llandaff, a mainly Latin compilation of 500 years of Llandaff diocesan records and is one of the great early books of Wales.
[4] Cardiff Naturalists’ Society Reports and Transactions, Vol 33, (1900-1901) Matthews, J Hobson,  “The Place names of the Cardiff District”.
[5] Book of Llandaff.
[6] Williams, Moelwyn I, “Cardiff – Its People and its Trade – 1660-1720”, Morganwwg – Transactions of the Glamorgan Local History Society, Vol 7, 1963.
[7] Williams, Moelwyn I,.
[8] Source – Office of National Statistics
[9] Cardiff Local Development Plan 2006-2026 Deposit Plan.
[10] Cardiff Local Development Plan Background technical Paper Number One – Population and Housing.  Updated May, 2014.   

A Performance Field Trip

We’re on the coach heading into the city along Cowbridge Road passing a knot of still functioning Canton pubs. Despite the rush everywhere else to close traditional saloon bars wherever they stand these west Cardiff places remain in business. There’s a spot at the dead centre of what was once Canton village where Llandaff Road, Delta Street, Gray Lane and what might be Leckwith Road but isn’t quite yet mix in a swirl of cars, buses, buggies and men in long coats smoking. Stand here and put your arms out and you can touch at least five working taverns: The Plum Tree (formerly The Goscombe), The Corporation Hotel, The Admiral Napier, The Canton, and Weatherspoon’s’ Ivor Davies. Down the road, in both directions are more.

Ivor Davies is the real name of Cardiff’s major contribution to world nostalgia, Ivor Novello. He was a prolific composer. He wrote Keep The Home Fires Burning, We’ll Gather Lilacs and, unaccountable for a Welshman, Rose of England. He also penned a 1930s musical titled Crest of a Wave. Not the Gang Show favourite but in honour of the textual proximity it’s the Ralph Reader song we all burst into. We do this as the coach slides the short distance between the pub named after him and the blue plaqued terraced house of his birth. 95 Cowbridge Road East. There are potted cordyline looking like palms in the front yard.


Mike Pearson
We’re in the company of dramatist, performance studies maestro and founder of the theatre company Brith Gof, Mike Pearson. Pearson is bald headed and angular, fearsome but avuncular, a perfect avant-garde host. He’s leading us on a Cardiff bus tour, an appendage of the annual Chapter Arts Centre festival of performance on the edge, Experimentica. The aim is to visit as many sites as possible associated with what were designated in the 60s as ‘happenings’ but as time moved on became something significantly more: performance, time-based art, alternative theatre – activity that breaks the relationship between public and art, where voice and idea mingle in places where the line between audience and performer has become irrevocably blurred.

Is this stuff new? Not a bit. The ideas on which it had been founded can be tracked back to the foundations of modernism at the start of the twentieth century, to the outrages of Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire and the hanging of urinals as art objects on New York gallery walls. Those innovations mostly stayed away from Wales. For the majority of art history we have never been an avant-garde place. Until, that is, a disparate group of artists beached up in Cardiff and clustered around the teacher Tom Hudson at Cardiff School of Art and Design, then at Howard Gardens. Hudson was virtually the only art teacher west of the Severn who recognised the opening of art to international influences and the smashing of the barriers between art and design as essential. He and his supporters were encouraged with trickles of financial aid  directed by Peter Jones at the Welsh Arts Council. Thus fortified they blossomed across Wales’ newly post-industrial capital. 
This was all by chance, of course, rather than design. Suddenly the social and cultural revolution that had rolled down sixties Kings Road London could be seen also in Kings Road Canton. The modernists and their successors had acquired a Welsh base. 

We reach the Reardon Smith, the 1932 lecture theatre in the east wing of the National Museum of Wales. Sir William Reardon Smith, 1856-1935, was a sailor, a shipping line owner (including the steam ship The City of Cardiff), a millionaire, a supporter of culture and the arts, and for decades the museum’s principle benefactor. He probably wouldn’t have liked much that the late twentieth century carried on in his name. Here, in the 1965 Reardon Smith Theatre, participants in the Commonwealth Poetry Conference tried to admit a pig as a delegate. Heike Roms, Pearson’s partner and collaborator, projects a grainy newspaper shot from the Western Mail onto the theatre’s giant screen. It shows three poets struggling with a two-hundredweight Vietnamese sow hired in especially for the occasion. She tells us there were near riots and all in the name of verse.



In 1968 Yoko Ono visited to perform her fly piece. This was pre-Beatles and Yoko was still hard-core avant-garde. Actually she didn’t come here. She sent a black and white photograph of herself smiling instead. This was carried on stage by two uniformed porters and placed on the piano. A little later a message from Yoko was read out to the not inconsiderable audience who had each paid five shillings to get in. “Fly” was all the message said. The audience was uncomprehending. Would she fly in later? Should we all fly now? This was a happening, after all. 

From this point on activity slowed. The evening progressed. There was silence and shuffling. Yoko did not appear. No one flew. More silence ensued. Nothing happened. Eventually, bored by all the inactivity, people began to drift off into the dark Cardiff night.

The following morning the organiser sat in his office with Yoko’s invoice on his desk. He thought for a moment about her appearance by photograph and then wrote out a cheque. This he took to the Xerox and pressed the button. He mailed the copy back to Yoko quoting her invoice number. Nothing further was said.

In their search for history Roms and Pearson attempt regeneration. Are the performances that occurred in these places still hovering somewhere? Can we restore their memory? Can their spirits be made to seep from the walls? Maybe. We return to the coach and head south. This time it’s to Splott, where the Mecca Ballroom, later bingo hall, stood until it was burned to the ground. 

In the neck of streets over the tracks from the Star Centre lie Cardiff’s precious metals, shining gems and planetary bodies: Comet Street, Constellation Street, Sun Street, Star Street, Gold Street, Silver Street, Topaz Street, Emerald Street, Sapphire Street and finally, Ruby Street, where we head. Here, in what was once the street’s Casson Studio Theatre, an early version of Cardiff Laboratory for Theatrical Research was launched. It performed Image. Its members wore white t-shirts and white trousers and were confined to the chambers of two upturned rostra. They mirrored each other, gesticulating. Then they came out and marched up and down the aisles. Behind them a slide guitar in the style of Ry Cooder played. The whole piece is now lost bar one roll of black and white snaps. Photographer unknown. 

The Casson later gave itself over entirely to that emerging art form – dance – to become Cardiff Community Dance’s Rubicon Theatre. It was opened by Diana Princess of Wales in 1982, the Lab a thing of the past.

The tour rolls on. We hear from guitarists who were there, shape changers still sliding the blues. In the cleared cholera graveyard of Adamsdown we recall theatre presentations that, back in the pre Health and Safety days of the 80s, oscillated between playgroup and community art. These were performances suspended brilliantly in a magic mix of creativity and anarchy. We stand in a large gaggle surrounding the singing George Auchterlonie while in the distance, out there beside the cleared gravestones, the district’s current young inhabitants watch and wonder. With the choruses we join in, loudly, as only a group of one-time thespians can.  

The tour takes in no longer extant spaces in the University Engineering Building. It crosses what was once the Art College car park, and then visits the East Moors Youth Centre. Here a tardis-like theatre, wood embossed and utterly unexpected, has been created in a former chapel out on the edge of former steel-making land. Then we finish. We are back where we started outside Chapter Arts Centre. Here the straggle of coach travellers is invited to recreate John Gingell’s pedagogical snaking line of 1971, hands on the shoulders of the person in front, those at the back knees crouched, those up front head reaching for the sky. Inside there’s a reprise of the barbershop singsong from Pip Simmons 1977 production of Woyzeck. Shave foam and permutation, all energy and style.

Woyzek 2014

This has been a field trip. It says that on the back of the printed hand out. It feels more like archaeology or some sort of scientologist auditing of a shared creative former lives. In the room outside Mike Pearson launches his new book, Marking Time. The subtitle is Performance, Archaeology and the City. It’s a history, analysis and locator for the material we’ve just toured through but not only for the east, for the rest of the city as well.

What you get out of this is Pearson’s take on how the record of a place can merge with the activity performed in it.  How location and circumstance can dictate outcome. Pearson becomes an excavator of the contemporary, a recent historian and a choreographer of artistic action. He quotes extensively from his scripts and from those of others. The ephemeral and the ghostly transient are recalled, often  from the distance of many decades. The past once again become real.

Back in the city’s east, the new artistic hub, now that Pontcanna has been trumped and the Bay washed out, I wonder how much artistic activity will continue. Another budget-slash era is upon us. Things are shrinking and closing down. Art flourishes in hard times, runs the suddenly present rumour. Or is that something the former funders just want us to believe? 




A Performance Field Trip end up on the Real Cardiff The Flourishing City studio floor 

What The New Book Is All About

Real Cardiff The Flourishing City by Peter Finch   is published by Seren Books and is available in bookshops.  Copies can also b...