CAMEO
Wellfield Road
Opened in 2015 in the old Halcyon Daze shop, this Roath off-shoot of the members-only Cameo Club in Pontcanna was accessible to all (if you could afford it), unlike the excruciatingly pretentious parent operation which opened in 1999 as a private bolt-hole for Cardiff’s ‘rich and famous’ (translation: Gavin Henson, Duffy and Matthew Rhys – be still my beating heart!) and closed in 2019 despite hip-capitalist owner Huw Davies declaring “the Cameo Club is here to stay” a few years earlier. His Wellfield Road operation staggered on until 2023 before it too shut for good. Davies has retained the ownership of both premises and now upmarket restaurants have moved in: ‘Thomas’ at Pontcanna Street and ‘Silures’ at Wellfield Road. Don’t be surprised if, like most of Cardiff’s egregiously over-cooked ‘Hospitality Industry’, they only make brief cameo appearances.

CARDIFF BAY TAVERN
Red Dragon Centre
Russell Goodway has a cunning plan: he’s going to eradicate what’s left of Cardiff’s local government services, bankrupt the Council by handing over £138 million to monster American multinational corporation Live Nation, keep his fingers crossed it will all be payed back in 46 years time (when he will be 124), demolish half of the thrilling Bay ‘regeneration’ he orchestrated just 30 years ago, and erect a 15,000 capacity arena nobody wants (except him and Live Nation). For the “committed Christian” none of this matters anyway because God will be his judge in the after-life. Yes, he’s beyond criticism. So, instead, I will congratulate him on the imminent demolition of the Red Dragon Centre (opened as the Atlantic Wharf Leisure Centre to fanfares of self-congratulation in 1997). The embarrassing, barrel-scraping, cheap’n’nasty hell-hole for pea-brained Americanised philistines will soon be gone!! Great! The Council paid the British Airways Pension Fund £60 million for it in 2020 ( who cares, it’s only money!) and now it can be flattened. Goodway loves new buildings; the city centre is a veritable forest of empty towers and he probably reckons they signal youthful buzz and a vibrant economy – the fact that demolition rather than rehabilitation is the most carbon-intensive, planet-wrecking activity of all would be neither here nor there to such a devout Anglican. Armageddon? Bring it on! With the Red Dragon Centre’s days numbered, tenants are rapidly vacating the hideously ugly eyesore, and one of the first to abandon ship in 2023 was Greene King’s indescribably awful Cardiff Bay Tavern. It wasn’t a real pub in any case – just a dirty, sticky, smelly dump where clueless fools could devour revolting microwaved slop and wash it down with a few chemical lagers. For once, Russell Goodway has done Cardiff a favour! He’s a genius!

THE CONWAY
Conway Road
The story of the Conway graphically illustrates the catastrophic trajectory Cardiff has followed in the last 40 years or so. The Conway was one of Cardiff’s best pubs for well over a century, hugely advantaged by its location on land that was purchased from the Romilly Estate by the National Land Freehold Society (NLFS) in 1852. The aim of the NLFS was to extend the electoral franchise, at the time restricted to (male) freeholders with the result that only the landowning Tory elite could vote. In Cardiff this complete absence of democracy was particularly acute because all the major landowners, led by the Bute Estate, refused to grant freeholds and instead sold 99-year leases in a deliberate policy of disenfranchisement that resulted in only 800 people out of the then population of 20,000 being allowed to vote – the smallest percentage of any equivalent town in the UK. The 50 hectares (110 acres) of farmland between Severn Road/Grove and Llandaff Road that the NLFS acquired were divided up into small freehold plots for individual development – the only freehold land in all of inner Cardiff until leasehold reform in 1967 and the only part of Cardiff not shaped by the odious motives of venal landowners and volume builders. This meant the area developed organically with a huge range of building styles, sizes and functions for all income brackets. It was in this period that the Conway emerged, originally built in 1858 as a private home and then converted into a pub as Canton rapidly urbanised following incorporation into Cardiff in 1875. Crammed with housing and small businesses of all kinds, Pontcanna was not stratified according to class or occupation and this eclecticism and plurality, combined with the surrounding glorious open spaces to the north, east and west, meant that it soon became Cardiff’s most appealing and distinctive area, more akin to the sophistication, idiosyncrasy and sociability of the European civic tradition. So it was for over a century, with the Conway allowed to evolve in its own way into a mellow, progressive, intellectual sanctuary and the epicentre of Welsh-speaking Cardiff. All was swept away by the imposition from the 1980s onwards of Thatcherite turbo-capitalist ‘market forces’ that monetised everything and wrecked society. Desirable Pontcanna went into gentrification overdrive as working-class people were gradually priced out and excluded, as happened in all pleasant environments across the UK. You know an area is finished when England’s far-right mouthpiece, the profoundly uncool Daily Telegraph, describes it as ‘cool’, as it did to Pontcanna at the start of this century. Property-investor Tories from England duly snapped up the housing stock, gated enclaves began to replace humble terraces, snobby niche shops and posh restaurants eradicated useful local amenities and the pubs of Pontcanna became ghastly gastro ghettos reserved for the vulgar rich. The Conway fell into the hands of ‘Knife & Fork Food Ltd’ and over 15 years duly died a slow death as regulars and pub crawlers voted with their feet until it closed last month due to “financial difficulties” – little wonder given the vast over-supply of superfluous ‘hospitality industry’ speculations in the city. Pontcanna has become an object lesson in the destructive impact of gentrification. Greed killed the goose that laid the golden egg and, in next to no time, transformed Cardiff’s best neighbourhood into its worst.

ST CANNA’S ALEHOUSE
Llandaff Road
Opened 2017, closed 2023, now a Pizza house. So much for the ‘micropub’ fashion! According to landlord James Morgan (formerly known as James Karran, a ‘Baptist Minister’), it’s all the fault of the cost of living crisis and nothing whatsoever to do with the creepy and confidentiality-breaching unsolicited text message he sent in 2021 to a young woman who had provided her phone number for ‘Track & Trace Purposes’ during the pandemic. We believe you, Reverend. On a point of information Your Holiness, Canton and Pontcanna were NOT named after ‘St Canna’ as you have claimed, but after the Nant Canna (‘White Brook’ – cannu means ‘to whiten’ in Welsh) which rose at Penhill and, foaming white, tumbled southwards to join the Taff at today’s Brook Street in Riverside. Drained almost dry by the 18th century it was filled and culverted out of existence in the 19th century. St Canna is a non-existent ‘saint’ concocted by the fevered imagination of Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) in an understandable but ultimately unhelpful attempt to assert Glamorgan’s Welshness in the face of rampant Anglicisation. Welsh academic and poet John Morris-Jones (1864-1929), who exposed many of Iolo’s invented histories in the late 19th century, predicted that it would take “an age before Welsh history was cleaned of Iolo Morganwg’s forgeries” – and bible-bashers peddling pseudo-religious codswallop in the 21st century are sure proving him right.

MISCELLANEOUS
■ Peppermint on St Mary Street, currently the 15th oldest pub in the City Centre (opened in 1862 as the Steam Mill Arms), has always been a coveted pub – by brewers originally and by pub management companies more recently – simply because of its prime position at the convergence of six roads. The fact that it’s recently been put up for sale at an asking price of £1.95 million confirms its continuing profitability. It also confirms how lucrative it is to flog ethanol, a highly dangerous, addictive anaesthetic that is a prime cause of heart disease, liver, kidney and pancreas failure, high blood pressure, many cancers, mental illness, dementia, accidents, violence and general criminality. Some might say that the way Cardiff Council has surrendered the entire length of St Mary Street/High Street to the pushing of this most lethal and damaging of all drugs, mainly to the young and the vulnerable who know no better and just want to have ‘fun’, is the very definition of wicked, irresponsible and stupid.
■ Yet again the two pubs that face each other in the core of St Mellons have had their names changed. For centuries they muddled along as the White Hart and the Blue Bell, but in the last 15 years both have endured ceaseless rebrands for no discernible reason other than change for change’s sake. Now we are supposed to refer to them as the Tŷ’r Winch and the Church Inn. Believe it or not, there was a time, not so very long ago, when the unchanging familiarity of a boozer was a quality to be proud of.
■ Having mentioned the rise of ‘games bars’ in Pubocalypse 11, I must refer to a sub-genre: ‘participation pubs’ – a new wheeze to relieve the easily bored, infantilised, socially awkward and intellectually incapable of their money. Examples in Cardiff include Ballie Ballerson (drink sickly overpriced cocktails and jump into a pit full of plastic balls); Flight Club (drink sickly overpriced cocktails and play darts); Tonight Josephine (drink sickly overpriced cocktails and post photographs of yourself under neon lights on Instagram); NQ64 (drink sickly overpriced cocktails and feed slot machines); Roxy Lanes (drink sickly overpriced cocktails and play bowling, shuffleboard, beer pong and batting cage – whatever they are); Alcotraz (drink sickly overpriced cocktails in a mock prison and pretend you’re bootlegging for a prohibition-era speakeasy); etc.
■ The Cottage in St Mary Street (see Pubocalypse 12) has reopened after nearly two years in cold storage. Brains sold it to the Valiant Pub Company, a newly-formed operation based in the English midlands that is busy buying up pubs all over the place, including the Cottage and 16 others from Brains as the once integral Cardiff institution liquidates its assets and disappears into history. The Grade II listed pub has been refurbished sympathetically, which should make its returning old clientele of sozzled dipsomaniacs feel at home.