Cardiff’s lost buildings 4

GreyfriarsGreyfriars RoadDuring the 13th century the Dominicans (Black Friars) and the Franciscans (Grey Friars) established religious houses just outside the town walls of Cardiff; the Black Friars near the West …

High tide

I first wrote about the Cardiff coast ten years ago, with a follow up piece a year later. In the process, I endowed a part of Cardiff with a semi-ironic …

Cardiff catch-up

What with one thing and another I haven’t written much about contemporary Cardiff for quite a while. It’s time for a bit of a catch-up, looking at 10 selected topics …

Cardiff’s lost buildings 3

Board Schools Various locations In 1870 the Liberal government of William Gladstone (1809-1898) passed the Elementary Education Act, the first attempt by the British State to establish a basic public …

Pubocalypse 9

Pandemic fall-out is likely to mean that a lot of the pubs ‘temporarily’ closed during lockdown will never open again. The random, spontaneous social mixing intrinsic to a public house …

Welsh lives matter

Leader of Cardiff council Huw Thomas has supported the totally justified calls by the Black Lives Matter movement for the removal from City Hall of the statue of murderous slave …

Flora Cardiffia

I regularly used to drive up and down the M4 between London and Wales in the 1970s and 1980s, initially on a motorbike and subsequently in a car. When I …

Parish pimp

Other than parts of Cardiff Castle, the solitary building left in Cardiff city centre that predates the industrial revolution is the parish church of St John the Baptist. As such, …

Juxtaposition

Cold-blooded creepy-crawlies, battery-driven hot air and…wait for it…branches of Reptile Cymru and Totally Wicked… Picture: Dic Mortimer