During the four weeks that I spent at Cardiff Airport as a teenager, I never ventured into the city even once. None of us did, we didn’t have cars and we certainly couldn’t think of any reason we might want to visit. Now, though, I decide to make the time to go into Cardiff and get the train from that station in Barry Island where I’d arrived all those years before and, boy, is it worth the wait?
Well, no, not really. Cardiff stands alone among the great capital cities of Europe. It may not have the planned elegance of Paris, the impressive grandeur of Berlin or the ancient beauty of Rome. It may lack the gothic spires of Edinburgh, the solid ruggedness of Belfast and the variety of London but what it does have is the ability to be mistaken for a medium-sized town in the Midlands. Even though it’s a capital city, it looks to me like a dozen or more other towns and cities. Even though it’s home to a third of a million people, the bits I can see make me think of Leicester with some dragon flags.
H.V. Morton, when he finally went In Search of Wales in the early thirties, said that Cardiff was much nicer than he had been led to imagine. Either things have not gone well in the intervening years for Cardiff or he had heard some terribly slanderous gossip. It’s not that I disliked Cardiff, it’s just that it didn’t impress me in the way that I expect a capital city to. As always in life, it’s the expectations which create disappointment, not the outside world.
Sure, there’s a long, wide avenue from the city centre to the old docks but it appears to be lined on one side with what look like housing association flats. Nothing wrong with housing association flats but they wouldn’t have them on the Champs Elysees. Even the regenerated docks don’t sing to me of progress in the way that Liverpool’s docks or even Salford Quays did.
Talking of regenerated, there is right here in Cardiff (or at least there was when I visited), a Doctor Who experience, a tourist attraction run by the BBC who make the programme there. It is £16 to get in and too late in the day for me to even consider wavering on the Herculaneum Test.
It did cross my mind that it might be worth visiting as, when being brought up by the TV in the 1970s and early 80s, I was a huge fan of Dr Who, catching the end of the Pertwee years, watching all the way through Tom Baker’s time in the Tardis, and finally finding out about more interesting things like girls and smoking when Peter Davidson was the Doctor. On balance, though, for sixteen quid, I’d have wanted David Tennant to show me round and take me on a trip to a historical period of my choosing. It’s closed, anyway.
Unfortunately, by the time I reach the castle it is also closed. In the first century AD, there was a fort built by the Romans on the site that would become Cardiff Castle. It would have overlooked the water and was probably built originally with the intention of subduing the Silures, who weren’t an alien race from Dr Who but the local tribe at the time.
There were four forts built here over the years, the last one was built in stone and parts of the walls can still be seen today. The city has the fort to thank for its name: Caer Taff means fort on the River Taff.
There was a Norman castle built here in the eleventh century, soon after the Norman conquest. The twelve-sided stone keep still sits on the elevated scarp within the old bailey, surrounded by the motte. In the 1780s, the traveller John Byng was amazed at how much money and how “much ill taste” Lord Mount Stuart had expended on the redevelopment of the castle. By the 1860s the castle was owned by his lordship’s grandson John, the 3rd Marquess of Bute. He was the richest man in the world and seems to have followed in the family tradition of possessing almost nothing in the way of good taste. He employed the architect William Burgess to build within the walls of the castle a gothic palace with turrets and spires which, to me, look like Disney’s first attempt at drawing Sleeping Beauty’s Castle after a very long day and during the time when he was having a nervous breakdown prior to his success with Snow White.
Bute Park, or to give it it’s Welsh name, Parc Bute, sits next to the castle and is very nice. Okay, it’s not Central Park (Parc Canalog in Welsh) but it’s a fairly glorious place to spend a little while on a warm evening. H.V. Morton did say that this park, which he mentioned was called Cathays Park until the city council bought it from Lord Bute, was the salvation of the city and I have to agree with him on that. You couldn’t visit Parc Bute on a pleasant day and go away disliking Cardiff. This evening the park is full of people enjoying the May sunshine.
They say that people don’t like change but they’ve clearly never been to Cardiff. Here a lot of people seem very keen on it indeed. I lost count of the number of people who asked me for change as I walked around. One slightly unsteady gentleman even offered an example of what the change might look like, holding aloft two twenty pence pieces to demonstrate what it was he was looking for. He told me that he only needed two more, a very precise request. He told me that it was to be used to buy him a train back to Barry Island. I felt somewhat cheated by this, if I’d known a single was 80p, I wouldn’t have bought a return for £5.10.
To use the return half of my clearly massively overpriced ticket, I return to Cardiff Central station and here is something which truly is impressive. The gigantic Portland stone art deco frontage with the words Great Western Railway carved into it put me in mind of all of those interwar years that I seem to manage to be nostalgic for without ever having lived through. The same feeling that the Great South West Road near to Heathrow would have given me had it not turned out to be a crappy little bit of dual carriageway.
The inside of the station brings to my mind flashes of Poirot; if David Suchet had minced across the main concourse with his prissy little moustache, I would not have been surprised. It is a huge, vaulted hall with rectangular grey marble columns seeming to hold the roof up. Octagonal lamps hang from each of the huge arches. It feels wrong to walk through here wearing anything less than a three-piece suit and matching trilby.
So grand was the Great Western Railway’s new station that, when it was first built, they convinced the council to demolish the area of the city known as Temperance Town because the sight of the poor people living there in terrible poverty would detract from the image they wanted to portray. Perhaps the past isn’t always the golden time that our imaginations suggest.
I get my seemingly over-priced train back to Barry Island and walk to the Premier Inn Barry Island Nowhere Near The Airport Hotel past twenty-seven pizzerias, a carpet shop and Griff’s Garage. Perhaps Barry Island is where pizzerias come to die because, from my brief visit, there certainly are a lot of them and they all look dead.
Barry Island was, and they tell me still is, a holiday resort. The little bit that I saw behind the station looked like Great Yarmouth on smack. I would no more choose to spend a holiday here than I would at Chernobyl. Apparently, it was a much-loved holiday destination for everyone’s favourite serial killer, Fred West. He even had his ashes scattered on the beach at Barry Island following his suicide at Winson Green prison in March 1995. That tells you everything you need to know about Barry Island.
They say that no man is an island but they obviously haven’t met Barry. I’m staying at the Premier Inn Barry Island Cardiff Airport Hotel which is conveniently situated for absolutely fuck-all; being a short one hour and eleven minute stroll from the terminal building. On my way to my room I meet a lighthouse engineer who works for Trinity House and is staying at the hotel while he works on the Monkstone lighthouse. Apparently, the tides and the unpredictable nature of the sea mean that he can only work on the lighthouse in short bursts but also that they could come at any time. Therefore, he is on permanent standby, living in the Premier Inn Barry Island. Either that or he has died and gone to hell and no-one has told him. We part company and head to our rooms, I take the lift but I presume that he was more used to taking the stairs.
The Monkstone lighthouse sits three miles to the east of Penarth, in the Bristol Channel. It was built in 1859. It just rises up out of the water, it isn’t on an island or anything, not even a small one called the monk’s stone. It is just a forty-five-foot-high tower built out of huge stone blocks. On top of this sits a tall, red fiberglass cylinder with a light on the top which was added in 1993 when the light became solar powered; which is a delightfully optimistic thing to do in Wales. Its light can be seen for twelve miles and is controlled from Harwich in Essex which is where the head office of Trinity House is based.
Trinity House was established by Henry VIII on 20th May 1514 when a Royal Charter was presented to The Master Wardens and Assistants of the Guild Fraternity or Brotherhood of the Most Glorious and Undivided Trinity and of Saint Clement in the Parish of Deptford Strond in the County of Kent. That’s still officially their full name today, but they don’t use it as their website address. They were originally established to oversee the conduct of pilots on boats in the Thames. Their first foray into lighthouses was the building of a pair of wooden towers with lights lit by candle at Lowestoft in 1609. Any further questions should be directed to:
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For my paid subscribers I’ll be staying in the area next week. For everyone else, we’ll be over the sea in Norn Iron in two weeks. See you there.
Very funny - won’t be rushing to stay on Barry Island!