Captain Edward Tupper V.C. was neither a captain nor a recipient of the Victoria Cross – although it suited his purposes to let people believe he was both. He arrived in Cardiff in May 1911 as an organiser for the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union (NSFU), which was on collision course with shipowners, as represented by the Shipping Federation. The economy depended on the men who worked the steamships, but life at sea was harsh. Sailors typically worked shifts – four hours on, four hours off – for little more than £1 a week and no overtime pay. They supplied their own clothing and bedding, and ate whatever rations were provided. The NSFU pushed for the establishment of a conciliation board to discuss sailors’ pay and working conditions, with no success. According to a socialist pamphlet published at the time: ‘Shipowners paid no attention to the request, and the Shipping Federation ridiculed it.’

Subscribe now

In response, the NSFU declared a strike on June 14, 1911. British shipping stopped. From Liverpool, Newcastle and Hull to Swansea, Southampton and London, ports were paralysed. Delayed cargo piled up on the wharves. Planned shipments never arrived. With industrial action spreading to Belgium, the Netherlands and the USA, the Seamen’s Strike of 1911 has a claim to being the world’s first international strike.

Captain Tupper’s contribution to the cause lay in delivering thunderous speeches that denounced the shipowners and delighted the strikers. A photograph (above) from July 1911 captures Tupper in action at Arcot Triangle. He stands on the balcony of the Royal Hotel, addressing a large crowd of men, women and children in a dense sea of straw hats and flat caps.

The street scene is still easily recognisable today. The Royal Hotel is now apartments but the building retains its distinctive curve and metal balcony rails. You can identify the houses in the background and pick out the trees in the triangle. Every time I cycle past, I see Tupper on the balcony and hear the cheers and jeers of the crowd. It makes me realise that as we move through places, places move through us too.

Tupper’s style was high in drama if low on fact. One account describes how he waved a blank sheet of paper at a crowd in Butetown, declaring he had evidence of a local shipowner’s ‘disgraceful love affairs’ that he was tempted to make public. His rhetoric also contained a vicious racist streak. Sailors willing to crew ships despite the strike were branded ‘blacklegs’ and Tupper singled out Chinese seamen for particular abuse. In a derogatory racist slur, he termed them ‘the yellow flotsam and jetsam of the Bristol Channel.’ A month after the strike started, Tupper’s words incited a dangerous riot that engulfed a ship moored in Cardiff’s Roath Basin.

I pass Roath Basin on my daily cycle route, after I’ve freewheeled down to Penarth Marina and pedalled across the barrage. As a child, I remember visiting the white tubular Cardiff Bay Visitor Centre that stood alongside the basin’s original entrance. To me, it looked like a giant squashed toilet roll, and I was fascinated by the large three-dimensional map of Cardiff inside. It gave a vision of the future, with a new sea wall snaking across the estuary and little block buildings and trees like lollipops along the edge of a permanent high tide. Next to the ‘Tube’, the bright red Lightship was moored in the basin. Half-boat, half-lighthouse, the vessel had been converted into a Christian centre with a café and meeting rooms. While temping in offices nearby in my twenties, I used to escape the corporate world at lunchtime by boarding the Lightship for a cup of tea and a couple of Welsh cakes.

Roath Basin was not the place for a quiet cycle or a Welsh cake in the July of 1911. Hot weather stoked the frustrations of strikers struggling with no pay and no resolution in sight. In a fiery speech outside the dock gates, Tupper announced that a ship berthed in Roath Basin had taken on Chinese sailors. He called for volunteers to form a picket. Some six hundred men swarmed into the docks. They stormed the ship, surging up the gangway and spilling on to the deck. Police, strikers and sailors were embroiled in fighting until Tupper turned up and called off the mob. In an adroit switch from rabble-rouser to peacemaker, he declared: ‘It is not blood we want, but the places of the Chinese on this boat!’

The threat to Chinese sailors spread to Barry, itself a major coal-exporting port to rival Cardiff. On June 28, the South Wales Daily News reported that a mass meeting heard how ‘London had been raked and scraped from one end to the other to get Chinese sailors.’

When thirteen Chinese firemen arrived in Barry, accompanied by twelve police officers, they were met at the dockside by a demonstration several hundred strong. In the chaos at No. 3 tip, the strikers tried to stop coal from being loaded on to a ship while the Chinese sailors barricaded themselves below deck for safety.

A remarkable photograph from 1911 shows a group of Chinese seamen walking down Subway Road towards Barry Docks with a police escort. I’ve cycled past Subway Road many times on my way to Barry Island and it takes no imagination to visualise the men on the road, with the railway bridge behind them. It takes a little more effort to mentally screen out the new apartment blocks and urban landscaping; the docks in Barry, as in Cardiff and Penarth, are undergoing a transformation from industrial to residential.

In the middle of the redevelopment is The Bridge Between Community Centre, a brand-new facility with an award-winning community garden. It’s also home to Lana’s Café, run by a self-advocacy group for adults with additional needs. By chance, I drop in during one of their weekly ‘Warm Spaces’ sessions and I’m treated to delicious homemade tomato soup with a bread roll and cup of tea, all free of charge. The centre is bright and warm, friendly and welcoming. As I sip my tea amongst the chatter of the café customers, it’s a curious thought experiment to recall the divisive mayhem at No. 3 tip, half a mile and a hundred years away.

Even Penarth Pier, that genteel symbol of Edwardian seaside promenading, was drawn into the strike. To avoid dockside battles with picket lines, the Shipping Federation moored an old supply ship, Lady Jocelyn, off Penarth Head. Boatmen with small craft, usually engaged in ferrying daytrippers across the Bristol Channel, were paid to discretely take sailors from the mainland to Lady Jocelyn, from where they could join steamships out at sea. Unsurprisingly, this arrangement enraged Captain Tupper. On July 13, he railed:

Last night a tug boat took Chinamen from Penarth Pier to Lady Jocelyn… that dirty slave dhow. I should like to meet the tug-owner. I’d fight him for fifty quid right here.

The crowd took him at his word. They marched on the Butetown offices of the tugboat owner, Edmund Handcock, which led to smashed windows and clashes with police. Tupper was arrested for disturbing the peace by causing ‘terror and alarm’. His arrest instigated further rioting. On July 20, warehouses were looted and burned, and Chinese-owned laundries and boarding-houses were attacked.

Share

I grew up in Penarth and my earliest sense of geography includes the pier, the headland and the bay before the barrage. In the eighties, my parents kept a 24-foot yacht on moorings in the Ely River. It was called Bootlace, in a nod to our unusual surname, and when the tide, weather and timing were right, we would sail out into the Bristol Channel.

I was too young to be much use as a deckhand, but I knew to swiftly duck down whenever Dad yelled, ‘Ready about, lee-ho!’ and the boom swept the sail over our heads and across the wind. I remember the complicated drive through former industrial sites and past the old Red House pub to the moorings, before Ikea or the Butetown Link Road were built. I remember the smell of the glistening mud, crisscrossed with jetties and ropes and bird tracks.

My family continued to be connected with boats; my parents later owned a canal boat, my brother became a naval architect, my sister rowed at university, and I lived onboard a hospital ship for over a year.

The Seamen’s Strike was settled on July 28, 1911, to the satisfaction of the NSFU. Tupper came out of it well. At his trial two months later, he used his oratorial abilities to successfully represent himself and was acquitted of all charges. He continued to work for the NSFU and published his autobiography, Seamen’s Torch, in 1938.

Although momentous at the time, the Seamen’s Strike has been relegated to a few archive photographs, old newspaper articles and obscure academic journals. Why was it forgotten? Perhaps it was due to its timing, only three years before the First World War gouged a hole in early twentieth century history. Certainly it was dwarfed by later industrial disputes. It had neither the scale of the General Strike in 1926, which involved over 1.5 million workers, nor the seismic social impact of the year-long Miners’ Strike from 1984 to 1985.

Share Cwlwm

If Captain Tupper, the sailors and the shipowners joined me on Penarth Pier today, they would recognise the cliffs and the coastline, the mudflats and the sandbanks, the headlands and the islands. But they would be astonished by the water.

The Bristol Channel, crowded with vessels for centuries, has few ships or boats on it now. We’re far removed from that hot summer in 1911 when a shipping crisis stopped the export of the world’s most wanted fuel for six tumultuous weeks. But, like the landscape, some features remain the same. A century later, we’re still dealing with workers’ rights, racism, and extreme weather. Like all who have gone before us, and all who will come after us, we layer the landscape with our lives, and the landscape layers our lives too.

Claire Boot is a writer from Penarth. She has worked with Literature Wales, Sherman Theatre and Honno.

Welsh name: Cennin Pedr

Scientific name: Narcissus pseudonarcissus

Ubiquitous and beloved, the golden daffodil is a national icon of Cymru. An emblem of our patron Dewi Sant (Saint David), it’s worn with pride on this day, the first of March, to commemorate his life and death. In early spring, before other flowers are awake, yellow blooms carpet city parks, woodland floors and road verges throughout the nation. The Welshness of the plant is unquestionable, and yet the origins, history and symbolism of Narcissi extend far further and deeper than this land, calling into question what we know of our national flower.

Whether by wind or the coat of a roaming creature, the seed travels. Firmly ensconced in earth, green blades cut through cold ground, but it will be years before the beginnings of buds start to swell – two, four, even six – time spent as a handful of slender leaves, folding in a breeze. Below ground it is busy; nimble roots extend their feelers, taking hold and searching for moisture. The pale strands are learning, connecting with other networks and systems, sharing information, nutrients and warnings.

Long ago, she was a chaste woman. The daughter of a prince, she lived piously, so they called her Non, meaning nun. One day, he came upon her; a supposed ‘noble man’ from Ceredigion. Out of aggression, the desire to subject – or simply because he could – he forced himself upon her and left, altering the trajectory of her life and legacy.

As though conjured by the violence and chaos of her situation, a storm raged on the south coast of Pembrokeshire. Pregnant and alone, she felt compelled to be in it. Stumbling towards the raging sea, holding her belly, she collapsed on the cliff edge. As lightning cracked, she gripped the rocks beneath as she pushed him out, the marks of her pain still visible in the stone.

As the boy was born, a holy well sprang up nearby. Or so they say.

She named him Dewi; god, or beloved.

Five thousand miles to the east, the first waxing lunar crescent is just about visible. All across China, New Year celebrations begin, marking the end of winter and start of spring. Symbolic of wealth, good fortune and immortality, ‘Crab Claw Narcissus’ bulbs are brought indoors for the traditional carving.

The plants are placed in shallow dishes with pebbles and water, symbolic of Daoist deities and Xiang River goddesses. Incisions are made in the bulbs which manipulate the new shoots, forcing them to curl and twist as they grow. Plants are often decorated to resemble roosters or cranes, the former symbolic of prosperity, holiness, luck and the sun. If they flower during the New Year period, it is considered especially auspicious.

When it is old enough, the first flower comes. Developing in the bulb, the stem emerges hollow and upright. Shedding its papery sheath, the petals unfurl to reveal the central corona; the golden trumpet, cup or bell that has inspired many a common English name: bell flower, bell rope, gold bells, golden trumpet…

There are 36 species of daffodil and over 26,000 cultivars. The wild daffodil, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, is the only species considered native to Wales and the UK. Due to the plant’s ability to hybridise (breed with other varieties), finding true wild plants can be tricky. Though Narcissi grow abundantly in wild places, the typical fully-yellow flowers are likely hybrids of different varieties. Wild daffodils are smaller in stature, up to 35cm tall, with a deep yellow trumpet surrounded by paler, teardrop-shaped petals. Ancient woods are best for spotting the wild species, especially Coed y Bwl, an ancient Ash woodland on the northwest side of the Alun Valley in the Vale of Glamorgan.

The principal Welsh name for the wild daffodil is Cennin Pedr, literally translating to ‘Peter’s leek’. Leeks, of course, are the original botanical emblem adopted by Wales. The story goes that in the seventh century King Cadwaladr of Gwynedd and his army were fighting off invading Saxons, and in order to identify themselves against the enemy plucked leeks from the field in which they stood, sticking them in their helmets. Seventeenth century English poet Michael Drayton tells how St David himself led the resistance against pagan Saxons, and who ordered soldiers to identify themselves with leeks. The reliability of this version is questionable and it’s possible that Drayton is one of many Englishmen to publish personally embellished versions of Welsh narratives, adding elements of Celtic fantasy to the mix.

As with daffodils, there are different varieties of leek: the wild leek, Allium ampeloprasum, bears long, needle-shaped leaves and sprouts bulbous clusters of lilac or pink flowers. The wild leek looks more like the culinary herb chives than the cultivated green and white vegetable abundant in supermarkets and winter allotments. Leeks have been a popular arable crop for centuries (featuring in Ancient Egyptian wall paintings), so it’s possible the soldiers were rampaging through a vegetable patch, but it seems more likely they would have come upon the wild flower, which would be easy to identify and tuck into armour.

Share

In Cymraeg ‘wild leek’ is cennin wyllt; the English translation neatly matching the Welsh. Other plants named cennin include chives: cennin syfi; garlic: cennin ewinog; and wild hyacinth: cennin y brain. In the Middle Ages, chives were known in English as ‘rush-leeks’, which leads me to wonder if, at the time of naming, cennin described a group of wild, bulb-forming plants with slender leaves, including the wild daffodil. Over time, as our relationship to the environment changed and plant knowledge that was once widespread dwindled, the words used to describe plants also narrowed. For most people today, the word ‘leek’ refers to the common vegetable, whereas in Cadwaladr’s time cennin would have evoked a different scene: fields of lilac flowers, the fragrance of garlic leaves crushed underfoot, the start of spring.

Woman with Plants

Photographic essays on Welsh botanical heritage and plantlore

By Esther Williams

Some speculate that daffodil leaves were confused with those of edible leeks at some point, similar in shape and colour. Others suggest the daffodil was adopted as a more appealing and sweeter-smelling alternative to the leek, promoted by former Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Whether this was an active choice to replace the original botanical emblem, or whether it stemmed from confusion surrounding translations of ‘cennin’, I do not know. It appears no one really does; the decision to employ daffodils lost to the passage of time.

Pedr is even more elusive, immortalised in anonymity alongside his cennin. While there don’t seem to be any popular theories as to who the famed Peter is, I would speculate that a plausible contender is St Peter, one of Jesus’ disciples. In Western culture, plants are often named after saints or prominent Christian figures, such as St John’s Wort, St James’ herb (ragwort) and marigold (after the Virgin Mary). One of the many Welsh names for wild daffodils is Blodau Dewi (‘David’s flowers’, after the Saint). It’s possible Pedr was also a canonised man, reflecting the prominence of Christian symbolism bestowed on the plant.

Additional Welsh names include lili grawys (lent lily), blodyn mawrth (March flower), croeso gwanwyn (welcome-the-spring), gwayw’r brenin (king’s spear) and – my favourite – clychau babi (baby bells).

Cultivated daffodils don’t offer much to passing pollinators but the wild species, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, is an important source of pollen for solitary bees early in the year when wildflowers are scarce.

Then senescence sets in. The flowers and leaves brown, wither and die, falling limply to the earth. Over time the roots contract, pulling the bulb deeper underground to more desirable conditions; preserved in cold dark dormancy.

In Ancient Greece, Narcissi were associated with death. The genus name Narcissus descends from the Greek ναρκῶ narkō, meaning ‘to make numb’, referring to the apparent narcotic and sleep-inducing qualities of the plant.

Whether the flower or the vain youth from Greek mythology was named first is unclear, but the symbolism within each continue to influence the other. In Ovid’s version, Narcissus was a young hunter from Thespiae, considered beautiful by all who saw him. While pregnant, his mother Liriope had been warned he would have a happy life as long as he ‘did not discover himself’.

Proud and arrogant, Narcissus rejects all advances from those around him. One spurned and bitter young man calls upon Nemesis, the god of revenge, condemning Narcissus to share his pain and fall in love with himself. Tiring from the heat of the day, Narcissus stops by a clear pool to quench his thirst. Seeing his reflection and not realising it is his own face peering back at him, he becomes infatuated. Driven mad by this impossible unrequited love, his colour fades and body wastes away, leaving a single flower in his place, with ‘white petals surrounding a yellow heart’. Though there are many flowers with white petals and a yellow centre, daffodils are associated with this myth due to the way many species thrive near water and the shape of their drooping heads, as though peering down at their own reflection.

Inspired by the fate of Narcissus, daffodils are associated with vanity. However, in Islamic tradition (featuring in the Qur’an), daffodils signify inner beauty, acting as metaphorical mirrors for self-reflection and the cultivation of virtues and spiritual growth.

The sixth century Persian ruler Khosrow I refused to be in sight of a daffodil flower during feasts, unsettled by what he perceived to be their ever watchful ‘eyes’. This resemblance is reflected in the Persian phrase narges-e šahlâ, the literal translation being ‘a reddish-blue narcissus’; a metonymy used by classical poets of the time to mean ‘the eye of a mistress’.

A second Greek myth featuring Narcissi as portends of death is that of Hades and Persephone. Persephone, the young daughter of the goddess Demeter, is picking flowers in a meadow when she sees a single golden daffodil. Enchanted by its beauty, she reaches for it, but Hades, lord of the dead, is waiting below. The ground opens up and he leaps from his golden chariot, grabbing Persephone and pulling her down into the depths of the underworld, where pale daffodils line the banks of the river Styx. The flower had been a trick, crafted to entice the innocent goddess in order to abduct her.

Grieving the loss of her daughter, and angered to learn that Zeus had previously promised Persephone to Hades, Demeter roams the earth in a black robe, causing all plants, flowers and crops to die, leading to famine. Panicked by this, Zeus negotiates with Hades for Persephone’s release. Hades agrees but tricks Persephone again, releasing her but ensuring her repeated return by feeding her pomegranate seeds; for if you eat in the underworld, you’re bound to return.

Seeing her daughter again, Demeter rejoices and the earth blossoms. But each time Persephone is required to descend to the underworld and be apart from her mother, life becomes cold and barren again, and the fruits of summer fade into the emptiness of winter, awaiting Persephone’s return and with it the start of spring.

Dormant in the warmth, as the days cool the buried bulb starts to move. Invisible to all above ground, a new stem and leaves are quietly forming inside, pushing out old layers which brown and dry, creating a papery skin or ‘tunic’. Some Narcissus bulbs have been found to have as many as sixty layers, meaning sixty life-cycles; like rings in the trunk of a tree.

As the days lengthen, the new shoots appear, and so we begin again. Seeds may have scattered and germinated nearby, but the most effective way to increase growth is splitting bulbs. The initial main bulb, the ‘mother’, will produce smaller bulbs, the ‘daughters.’ When cultivating daffodils, the bulbs can be dug up, separated and planted in other locations. Left to their own devices the daughters will cling to the mother, sprouting their own shoots and flowers but remaining together as one plant.

Representative of new life and renewal, in the late Middle Ages Narcissi began to be featured in Christian paintings, believed to be one of the plants that grew at the foot of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. According to some bible interpretations, it was St Peter who was first to see Jesus resurrected, possibly explaining the link between Pedr and daffodils, both synonymous with new life and hope.

Dewi Sant died on March 1st in either 589 or 601 AD. Having spread the teachings of Christianity throughout Wales and beyond, his following continued to grow after his death. He was buried at his monastery where a shrine was erected, although this was destroyed in a fire in 645, and the resuscitations repeatedly raided by Vikings. The restored medieval shrine prevails however, at St David’s Cathedral, a destination for thousands of pilgrims over the centuries; the journey considered akin to a pilgrimage to Rome, and three journeys equal to one to Jerusalem.

The daffodil’s relationship to Wales also continues to evolve. In the Black Mountains, one thousand feet above sea level, the bio-research company Agroceutical Products grows and harvests thousands of Narcissi to extract Galantamine, an alkaloid naturally produced in the bulb that improves cognitive function in humans, used as a treatment to slow symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Galantamine is also present in other wild plants such as snowdrops, but growing sites are limited, so cultivating daffodils offers an abundant source to make the much needed medication.

And so the seasons start anew.

With each golden bloom Persephone is once more returned to her mother on earth; the pilgrimage is complete. The daughter bulbs divide; the pollinators replete. Cennin Pedr continues to open its petals, to blow its trumpets, to ring its bells – if only for a short while.

In Welsh folklore, whomever is first to see a daffodil in bloom is considered lucky and will receive more gold than silver that year. But for some reason – whatever you do – don’t point at it!

But whether you see a daffodil today or not, in the words of the holy man himself: ‘be joyful, keep the faith, do the little things you have seen me do.’

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus.

Subscribe now

Esther Williams is a botanical illustrator, writer, researcher and musician based in Pembrokeshire. Follow her substack Wild Welsh Plants for more deep-dives into Welsh botanical nomenclature and plantlore. She also runs the illustrated seed business herb & all, highlighting Welsh plant names and historic herb uses. Photos taken by Esther Williams in Hook, Pembrokeshire, and Coed y Bwl, Glamorgan.

It builds slowly but when it happens, it happens suddenly. A silence at the end of an anecdote where the laughter dies on the stale air, the warm smell of food served hours ago, that lasts just a little too long. The night enters the room and with it the cold mantle of sobriety. ‘I’d better take my leave,’ one of us mumbles, and we tumble out into the air and head in opposite directions. In those moments I’ve felt most like I understood this city: the streetlights bright enough to forget pinholed dark skies; the fumes, fried food, piss and hollering carried by the air. As I walk home, Cardiff feels alive with story and myth. Crossing Canton Bridge, it is as if a ceffyl dŵr might rise unbidden from the Taff. More likely – and more Lloyd Robson – it would be a shopping trolley stalking those muddy banks.

It is hard to say what made me decide to leave Cardiff. ‘I’ve been here seven years,’ I weakly tell people who ask. But really, I’ve been catching glimpses from the corner of my eye – the amber sun clashing with the beating wing of a swan on the lake, the softness of the wet catkins under my feet as I run – that tell me that an ending is coming. Leaving is an aesthetic process as much as it is a practical or emotional one, and, in this instance, the poetic preceded the prosaic in my reasoning too. Earlier, in the pub, I said that I would ‘take my leave’; another choice would have been to ‘make my exit’, for this is what I’ve been doing for some time now.

A few years ago, still in Cardiff, I readied myself to leave a house I had lived in for three years, through the darkness of the pandemic and the ending of a fraught relationship. That house had been my prison – as I’m sure many felt at the time – but also my cocoon, my recovery ward. With everything finally out, I looked around the rooms and felt lost in their emptiness. This place that had felt so cramped at times now was as wide as a school hall. This isn’t a feeling my generation is unfamiliar with: since I left university in 2017, I have moved six times – some will have moved many more. You get used to the anticlimax of the ending of something ordinary yet monumental. But as I cast around that empty house, I felt like I was looking for something, the sort of closure you get departing a friend. And so, without thinking, I started dancing – the house my imaginary partner. One last dance before parting ways, a bow of recognition at the door, and the release of closing it for the last time.

This is what I mean – I, we all, make an aesthetic experience out of leaving, caught trying to make sense its contradictions, of the big–smallness of it. Leonard Cohen brings this wonderfully to bear in his song ‘Alexandra Leaving’. ‘Suddenly the night has grown colder,’ it begins; you force yourself, cruelly, masochistically even, to leave that which is ‘radiant beyond your widest measure’. To leave is, at its fullest, to believe wholly that the left object, place, or (with most difficulty) person will live on fully, independently without you. I still cannot return to my university city, which I felt when there was indelibly imprinted with my presence, for fear of seeing it proceeding gleefully and fully in my absence. ‘Do not say the moment was imagined’, Cohen implores, ‘Do not stoop to strategies like this’. Perhaps Cardiff will be the same. Either way I owe it this valedictory address.

As much as you might want it, there’s no such thing as the last ordinary day. Instead, what coalesces is a photo montage of lastness – a taxonomy of finalities. The last day drinking coffee in the courtyard from the nice, handleless cups I bought in London; the last day walking around Roath Park after work, talking through all the day’s frustrations, dreaming of what we’d do next; the last day the house was perfumed with the puckering sweet–sourness of simmering hibiscus. This time we don’t dance but instead steal away into the night, our cars filled despite all the other trips we’ve done before to move our things, swearing this is the last time we’ll do it ourselves.

On the Tuesday after, we go to Lleuwen Steffan’s gig in Capel Salem, which inspired the famous painting of the old woman, the devil and the shawl. Family pews like sheepfolds interlock within; next door is a cottage whose gentle decay you can witness on Google’s several revisits to the area. Many have processed up here with torches, and I think about the centuries of farming folk and others trickling down off the mountains like the rain to gather here each Sunday after each Sunday. The room fills with electronic drum loops, synths and effects stretching and manipulating the old recordings of hymns, some so rare they don’t exist anywhere else. At the end, we all give money to Gaza. It’s the first evening I feel a sense of ease – a rhythm not just of a life that is working, possessions unpacked, spatulas and pans all located, but one of a life that could be good, easy, and graceful.

Of all the things I want to do, what I most want is to do them with grace. To me, this is the calm ease of action that comes with the balance of perception and instinct – it of course relates to expertise, but also to a pre-linguistic feeling and impulse. I have never found flow states to come naturally, but I have always been able to be conscious of when I am finding the ease of doing something fulfilling, revelling in the dexterity of my hands, the strength of my arms, or the sharpness of my mind.

I don’t find writing like this. Often, I feel like a monk, scratching slowly on thin goatskin, wary of making the wrong mark and growing frustrated with the need to fill up my ink. Editing, however, feels more like swimming – or to be exact like the high rope elegance of an actor suspended by wire above the stage looking down. When I edit, I work in pen or on screen, enjoying the poise of my hands and the feeling of at once working on existing material – smoothing it, chiselling bits out – but also the freshness of discovery, finding things out first, the thrill of knowing the quality of something before anyone else knows it exists, delivering that newness into the world.

Part of that ease, I feel, comes from the fact that it’s something I’ve always known. Editing, so to speak, runs in the family. My father is a copyeditor and my mother a graphic designer. They work well as a pair and although I’ve always admired the artistic, creative work my mother does, it is the editing that my father does that I’ve most always identified with. At first it looks like a different alphabet: the caret mark with a cocked leg referencing you to the margin where the change lies; stet dots under words backtracking on a suggestion as your understanding of the sentence develops. These marks are the chisel and the plane, working the words into their best expression but also allowing you to revel in the distinctiveness of the process.

I remember for a while as a teenager when every Saturday after breakfast my father, in his dressing gown, would kneel down at the bookcase and pick out vinyl records for me to listen to that day, trying to read the cat-claw-shredded spines. I would note absentmindedly the crack of his knees as he rose again, handing me Bob Dylan bootlegs, psychedelic deep cuts and country rock. At the time, it was an experience of creativity and newness as I listened to those albums whilst doing my homework at the living room computer next to the hi-fi. I loved to hold the records between two fingers tense on the edges; in perfect balance, they’d swing gracefully, gyroscopically in the air as I took them from the sleeve to the platter. Sometimes, if something particularly caught my attention, I’d stop work and just listen. Sometimes, the record player wouldn’t register the end of the side, and would keep looping the lead out, and I’d listen to the quiet–loud rustle of the dust.

Nowadays though, I appreciate his perspective more: the curatorial process of planning narrative, exposition, revealing slowly the argumentation of an era of transformational music when he was only a bit older than I was then. Editing lies in this comfortable place between reading and writing: although a very talented writer, it is in this humbler space that I think my father has always found himself most comfortable. The real joy of editing for me is in seeing the birth of an idea and its adolescence, working with the writer to coax it into its best form of life. In this respect, I imagine it’s not totally dissimilar from having a child – the quiet modesty of forming, encouraging, augmenting, in a role largely without credit.

What does this all have to do with leaving Cardiff? I’ve been at the heart of a sort of ‘project Wales’ way of thinking for a decade now, from early forays in my undergraduate writing about Wales from afar, to joining the welsh agenda as culture editor in 2017, and for the past year as co-editor of Cwlwm. In all of that time, I have been in a sense in pursuit of a common enquiry: what do we do with all that is here, with all that is Welsh culture? How do we make sense of where we are, not in the sense of a Wales which is predestined – either positively or negatively – by a heavy history, nor one that is all one thing. Rather, what must we do to describe a polysemic nation, too mixed, too hybrid, too ruined and perfect to be merely singular – a mass free jazz improvisation of culture. How can writing bring out the strangeness, the potential for thinking differently or in a more engaged way, from all of that?

It’s easy to feel – I do feel – that despite there being so much happening in the city, it is at once hard to find the newness needed for this sort of thinking. Everything seems the same each time – the same walk, the same habits, the same shops. It’s not the same of course, the million individual stories sit under each person passed ready to burst out like a modernist novel, but the patterns are. The realisation came upon me, before I knew it, that I needed to find different patterns whose language I better spoke.

Share

Cardiff is a place which, for me, constituted the process of curating and editing an identity in which now I instead feel the need to focus more clearly on a process of becoming and belonging. I think that we sometimes conceive of the idea of belonging as a mental process of reconciliation or coming to terms, rather than an enmeshing, or a pluralising of the self around the needs and desires of others and seeing one’s place within a framework where we work together to deliver that. I have long ignored this as a foundational need within myself. It is something that, for better or for worse and with full recognition of my role in causing it, I cannot fulfil as a late millennial forced to gentrify another neighbourhood of a city which does not feel like mine.

In my first article for Cwlwm, I wrote that I believed the Welsh borderlands should be considered not just for ‘its political effects’ but that there might be merit in thinking ‘about how it feels in each instance of its presence’ in the believe that greater consideration of affect – the feeling of the thing – could create new modes of understanding and political realities. If it is not too grandiose a statement, it is in this effort to feel the instances of a place that I am now choosing to invest. It is not as simple as a move from a position of editing to writing (nor do I intend to stop editing), but it is a desire to push myself more clearly and distinctively into a position of voicing, rather than structuring, the inquiries about Wales and about the places and communities that matter to me within it.

Coming from the border, and born outside of Wales, I consider myself to have chosen Welshness. I fiercely defend that choice and the right to have made it actively, joyfully and continually. At the same time, it has suited me to be on the edge – waving, not drowning in Welshness. Bourgeois Cardiff holds that convenient position of reputational and governmental centrality but cultural lightness (notwithstanding the city’s own cultural specificities). Wales was Wales before Cardiff was Cardiff, and moving in that city is moving lighter than elsewhere. For a boy from the borders, not so sure about how deep I wanted to paddle in the hard stuff, that was a good place to be.

Subscribe now

Now I am moving from the edge to the centre of a certain idea of Wales founded in the language. (Although beyond my window now is the sea, another edge, looking back at me as I write.) In giving up the editorial position, the high seat in Cardiff, I feel for the first time a real, tangible possibility of being engulfed. Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse sees engulfment as a form of annihilation; his keyword s’abîmer also connoting an abyss. This annihilation is not a negative process; rather, it is the overwhelm of immediate thought beneath feeling: ‘I have no responsibility here, the act […] is not up to me: I entrust myself, I transmit myself’. In many ways, this is the act of faith that I am enacting, leaving the city, leaving my language, and entering an abyss of my own making. The prize, I hope, is the sort of rootedness of which I have increasingly felt the lack in recent years.

Shortly after arriving, we are overcome by a storm – the first of many since. I wake in the night and hear the wracking of the house, the timbers creaking slightly as it is tested, pushed, almost overwhelmed. But in the morning we are still there, and I feel the emptiness left behind in the air filling up quickly with gusty sunshine. The wind is whipping the heather as I walk up the hill in the morning, beginning to be able to nod and smile to the same dogwalkers I see each time. I am starting to know the names of the farms dotted across the gentle transition from mountain behind me to the sea in front and to be able to read their histories in the stone walls that encircle and crosshatch the good land around here. These things don’t necessarily mean anything practical, but to me they are alive with a different meaning: perhaps my old habits, the tracing of industrial remains and of the constant remaking of space that occupied me in Cardiff, can be reused here. It feels like I can bring a common enquiry to a new place, where I can learn new things, not least now truly learning Cymraeg.

Perhaps this what I’ll be giving up: a certain idea of the lone creative, the omnipotent editor, endlessly picking and choosing and shaping a life for myself from the rich fabric of a city like Cardiff. Instead, I’m hoping for an ensemble role as a spinner of something a bit larger than myself. The part that I think I’ll keep: the humble way in which editing presupposes that the answer is already arrived at, that it’s just waiting to be teased out and clarified. To paraphrase, I don’t want to change the world, and I’m not looking for a new Wales: it’s already out there. The time comes, then, to go and find it.

Merlin Gable is co-editor of Cwlwm.

As far as my reasons for being here, I am not entirely sure. All I know is that it was not until a few weeks after moving to London, and walking into Capel y Boro (a Welsh chapel in the heart of London) for a male voice choir rehearsal, that I suddenly remembered about Capel y Trinity. Only then did I give any serious thought to the fact that there, between the age of about seven and nine, I had attended Ysgol Sul, or Sunday school, more or less every Sunday, along with my younger brother and a couple of school friends. I’m not sure whether it was the interior of Capel y Boro that brought these memories to the fore: the smell of the wood from the pews and that heavy musk that makes your head go dizzy for a few seconds; or the sound, and the peculiar way in which voices reverberate with a certain broad, eerie timbre; or the ever-present silence, even when there is noise. Perhaps it was simply the shock of finding such a seemingly familiar environment where I had least expected it, in the heart of London. But for whatever reason, Capel y Boro stirred memories of this forgotten but formative period attending Ysgol Sul in Capel y Trinity. And so, I resolved to pay it a visit the next time I was in Swansea.

This took two years to get around to doing, however, as these things do. On a cold morning last December, on the way back from a haircut in the Uplands with an afternoon gaping wide ahead of me, I am struck with a desire to see the chapel again. And so here I am stood, outside Capel y Trinity, Glanmor Road, Swansea. A thick chain lies upon its gates. I am having a good look at it for the first time in almost twenty years, or perhaps ever. The chapel itself is not that old, as far as chapels go, having been built in 1954, but it looks somehow older than its seventy years, and not in the usual way that chapels and old buildings do. The engraving of its name, carved into the stone arch above a thickset wooden door, is quite faded, and the year of its founding barely readable. While it was originally established as a Methodist chapel, a modern plastic sign now clearly reads ‘Eglwys Bresbyteraidd Cymru’ (Welsh Presbyterian Church) and lists its opening and closing times. The path leading to the chapel door is slightly overgrown with weeds and leaning long grass. A brown stain rises up against the outside of its pale tobacco-cream walls, almost like the damp earth itself is creeping upwards, sucking it down. Apart from a nativity scene atop a plinth on one of the gate’s stone pillars, which could have been placed any time between the last year or five, it looks seldom visited.

The Sunday school is attached to the right of the chapel, and is somewhat older and smaller than it. A sign on the roof above the door reads ‘Glan-Môr – Cangen Ysgol Trinity M/C Abertawe’ [Glan-Môr, Swansea Trinity School Branch], and then beneath it the year of its establishment. It was run by the mam of my mam’s best friend from school, whom we called Anti Glenys, and who would read to us patiently from the Welsh Bible. We sat obediently through these readings, out of deference to dear Anti Glenys, who tried her best to keep us engaged with questions and narrations of the Bible’s better-known hits – but this was on the one condition that we could draw while she did so. And, being the age we were, our primary interests during these years were soldiers, guns, and fighting in general, and so these were the core subjects of our doodles. We produced ream upon ream of drawings depicting gruesome battlefield scenes, and I’m sure the sweet irony of our violent sketching being accompanied by messages of kindness, forgiveness and cariad Duw was not lost on Anti Glenys, though she showed little signs of impatience with us. Then, every few months, we’d get up in front of the congregation and sing Welsh songs or perform on the piano, which we called a gymanfa ganu, or a singing recital.

Since I could not get inside today, all I could do was imagine its interior, and I realised that I could walk through the entire building from memory. We would enter the Sunday school through a small side door, walk past ten or so rows of plastic chairs which were never used, to the back of the room, where there was a long table at which we’d sit. Anti Glenys would stand at the head of this table and read to us while we doodled. There was a piano or an organ against the opposite wall, and straight ahead, opposite the double doors, was a small kitchenette, where we were not allowed, and a bathroom next door to this. Then, to the left of the table was another heavy wooden door, beyond which was a passage that led to the chapel.

This is hazier in my memory, as we went inside only for our gymanfa ganu, and I suspect that some of my memory of its interior is informed by watching home videos of us playing the piano and singing. I remember where the piano stood — just behind a pillar nearest the pulpit, to the right hand side. I remember the smell of this room (though all churches have that hollow, old-wood smell), and something particular about the light (though all memories are coloured by that strange iridescent brightness). I remember talking with old ladies who said they were in school with my nana, or who knew my mam when she was a girl (I remember finding these claims utterly unbelievable). But I also remember the excitement of being allowed up into the pulpit to recite poetry or sing songs, and of the thrill of having one’s voice amplified by the microphone as if by magic. It strikes me that, as a musician and performer now, perhaps this early enjoyment of using a microphone might have stayed with me somehow, and note the fact that it is once again music that has drawn me back to a similar interior in Capel y Boro.

Subscribe now

Upon my return to London and spurned on, perhaps, by my failure to gain access to Capel y Trinity, I was inspired to find out more about the Welsh chapel that I knew about in London, Capel y Boro, and discovered, to my surprise, that there was a network of other surviving Welsh places of worship of various denominations dotted around the city. I made a list of them and went about visiting as many as I could, though this proved more difficult in practice than I had anticipated; they are so disparately spread out around London and its outskirts that, considering the slightly limited windows in which churches are typically open, it would take months to see them all. So, perhaps favourably for the purposes of this piece, my search was limited to three.

Why I was doing this or what I could really hope to glean from doing it, I’m not entirely sure. But I figured that by just going to them, and hopefully gaining entry to them, I could discover more about them and the people who use and engage with them than I could from merely reading up about them online. I wanted to see in what ways, if any, they were self-consciously ‘Welsh’, and how they communicated this. I was motivated, I think, by a disbelief that these places and any aspects of their ‘Welshness’ could survive in a city that, on its surface, is so all-consuming.

The venture began with disappointment. My first port of call was Jewin Church, near the Barbican, and not far from where I am currently living in east London. It was one of the only Welsh churches in London that was advertising a service on the first Sunday after New Year’s Day, 2025. I also read that it was one of the first specifically ‘Welsh’ places of worship in London, built in 1774 and motivated by the increased need to accommodate the growing influx of Welsh migrants into London; a series of sites and chapels were founded on various nearby streets, until Jewin Church’s permanent location on Fann Street was settled upon. And so my partner Evie and I wound our way around the deadened Sunday streets of Farringdon and Barbican, without a soul in sight. It was drizzling, and January’s icy grip only deadened the silence further.

Even though the church itself is eclipsed by the skyscrapers and towering flat blocks which populate this part of the city, Jewin Church remains an impressive structure. Damaged significantly by bombing in 1940, it was rebuilt in 1960 and now boasts a sturdy modernist frontage of dark brick, with deep wooden doors marking the entrance, its spire scaled by narrow slivering windows of steel-coloured glass. Around the flanks of the church are smaller, squatter windows that could be opened, and one of them was. But that was the only evidence of any activity inside the church, because, although we’d arrived in time for the bilingual service as advertised, there was nobody around, and the doors were securely locked. I knocked, circled the whole perimeter, tried other doors, but to no avail. Either the website was incorrect, or simply nobody had showed up.

So we were forced to gather whatever information we could from outside of the church. A sign on the wall reads ‘Eglwys Bresbyteraidd Cymru’ (Presbyterian Church of Wales), ‘Sefydlwyd [Established] 1774’ below which is information regarding ‘Amser yr Oedfaon [Times of Services]’ and ‘Croeso Cynnes I Bawb [A Warm Welcome to Everyone]’, and some other contact details. Below this is an engraved stone slab, now quite difficult to read, but which commemorates the Mayor of London’s reopening of the church in 1960. There was no English on either sign, apart from the translation of the church’s name. This was surreal to me, being in such a central part of London. Around one corner there was another sign, unrelated to the church, marking Fann Street as the area in which Huguenot fan makers worked and met to ‘adopt their new constitution’ in 1710, serving as another suggestion that this building and the surrounding area were perhaps more indicative of cultural movements which were beyond them, of which they were merely a seam of a richer tapestry – that perhaps the Welsh aspects of this place were subsumed by history and London’s rich culture. I noted that the church shows up on Google Maps as ‘Capeli Cymraeg Llundain’ (London Welsh Chapels), portraying it more as an emblem of the wider network of London’s Welsh chapels, rather than an active church in and of itself. It made it all the more noteworthy, however, that such a building had survived. Without being able to get inside, I conceded defeat and left somewhat dejected.

I was resolved to continue with the project, however. The next spot on my list was St Benet’s, Blackfriars. It was a ten minute walk from my place of work on Fleet Street, so I decided to head there one day during a lunch break on Thursday 9 January, the following week. I had read online that, on this day, an organisation called ‘Friends of the Church’ volunteered and would be available to show me around the church between the hours of 11am and 3pm. At around 1pm, I headed over. The cold of London had deepened, but on this day the sky was a glorious blue. I walked along the Thames which was dazzling as it whipped beneath Blackfriars Bridge and London Bridge. I dodged runners and walkers on the river path and listened to Bob Dylan’s Modern Times, and felt a keenness to get inside a church this time. I scaled some steps away from the river and emerged on the bend of a quiet street where there seemed to be some construction underway. I immediately saw the tower of St Benet’s, with St Paul’s watching indifferently in the background, hardly even aware of this humble and relatively little church existing a few hundred metres or so away, although both churches were built at similar times, designed by the same person.

A church dedicated to St Benet has been on this site since 1111 AD, though it only became a self-proclaimed ‘Welsh’ one in the late nineteenth century, and its history is as extraordinary as any old church in the heart of London has any reason to be. Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn were given their last rites here in the sixteenth century, before immediately heading for their respective executions (likely via the Thames). Shakespeare (who once lived nearby) refers to it in Twelfth Night (Feste reminds the Duke Orsino that ‘The triplex, sir, is a good tripping measure; or the bells of Saint Bennet, sir, may put you in mind – one, two, three’). The architect Inigo Jones was buried here in 1652, and, after being destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, it was rebuilt by Christopher Wren. It is allegedly the only one of the churches of the City of London that has remained unchanged from Wren’s designs, and one of only four City of London churches that were unscathed following air raids by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. However, the other three were affected either by IRA bombs or renovations, so it likely is the only church in this area that has essentially remained the same since its rebirth in the seventeenth century.

That is, of course, apart from one significant change which came in 1879. In the 1870s, the church was considered unnecessary, given the City of London’s declining population, and was scheduled for demolition. But Welsh Anglicans sent a petition to Queen Victoria herself asking for permission to use the building for Welsh-language services. In 1879 she granted this permission, and such services have been held there ever since.

Before I learned all of this, however, I was, yet again, definitely locked out. The ‘Friends of the Church’ were nowhere to be seen, and despite knocking loudly on the door, and attracting the attention of several homeless people who were residing in tents under a bridge across the path, I conceded that, as with Jewin Church, I had consulted an out of date website, or had got it wrong. Either that or, more sadly, there was nobody here looking after this church. Its website’s information page had, after all, been written in 2015. I saw a doorbell by the firmly locked entrance and rang it as a last resort. I heard no bell ringing inside, waited a couple of minutes, and started to walk back towards the Thames, again deflated.

But as I was rounding the corner to join the street, I heard the door open and a tentative ‘hello?!’ calling after me. Turning around, I saw an old white-haired man leaning outside of the doorway. I scampered back and asked him whether I could go inside and take a look, explaining that I had some interest in London’s Welsh churches. The man’s name was Hywel, and he spoke with a London accent (he explained he had lived here for forty years but was from Llandeilo originally). He granted me access and led me in, locking the door behind him.

It was immediately clear that this church wears its Welshness very much on its sleeve. Welsh dragons on wooden crests line the walls, and enormous Welsh flags hang gracefully down from the gallery above as you walk in through bulked up wooden doors. Hywel allows me ten minutes in which to wander around the church as I see fit, as he has a call to make, and so I stand mostly still in the silence of the space.

I wasn’t entirely sure what I should do next, or what I was looking for. But there was no secret that this church seemed to be hiding. I suppose I was surprised by the overtness of its display of Welshness, that a church in so central a part of London was manifesting its Welshness so obviously. These were my own presumptions, of course. Perhaps I had actually been hoping that, Indiana Jones like, I would be forced to explore the church crypts for older evidence of half-forgotten Welsh parishioners, or uncover hidden manuscripts buried in the church walls.

But this was clearly not necessary. Upon entering the space, Hywel handed me two paper information sheets detailing the history of the church, one in English and one in Welsh. On every seat was a Welsh and English Bible, and stacks of Welsh hymn books and bilingual copies of the Holy Eucharist. Even the no smoking sign was in both Welsh and English. There was a memorial plaque for the composer Meirion Williams, who was the church’s organist in the 1960s and 1970s, and several war memorials for Welsh soldiers, one of which had ‘Ffyddlawn Hyd Angau’ [Faithful Until Death] as its heading. It was, essentially, like any other church that you would walk into in Wales, perhaps even more overtly ‘Welsh’, but it just happened to be located more or less on the banks of the River Thames, and within clear eyeshot of St Paul’s.

Share

After ten minutes of soaking up this room as best as I could, I called for Hywel, who had disappeared out of sight, and thanked him for letting me in. I took some final pictures in the hallway of the church of things I hadn’t noticed when I walked in – a welcome noticeboard which also had information about Dewi Sant – and walked into the stark cold London in the bright heart of its winter. The city erupts in sound. St Paul’s glowers down from the right, and the Thames roars past to me left, reminding me in no uncertain terms of where I really am. I walk back to work, but not before sitting on a bench on the Thames path, looking out at the river and trying to reflect on what I had seen.

For many people, I’m sure, it is not especially extraordinary that there are Welsh devotional spaces in London. But I think that some of its significance for me lies in the fact that much of my personal Welsh identity is founded on being away; that my ideas of Welshness have, for my adult life at least, mostly formed while living outside of Wales, in places which do not feel Welsh, where meeting Welsh people or having the opportunity to speak or read Welsh are few and far between, but golden when they arise. Finding these churches and being inside them makes me consider the many generations of Welsh people who themselves lived much of their lives outside Wales, because these churches are among the most stark examples of London’s vast Welsh communities which has settled over the centuries. These churches, and the many more that are no longer surviving, were established to serve the hundreds and thousands of Welsh people that, while they could survive outside of Wales the land, could not do without its spiritual and cultural sustenance. And so they transported it, as best they could, to London.

However, there was something missing about my silent afternoon in St Benet’s church. While I was glad to have managed to cross the threshold of the church, unlike Jewin’s, and find some evidence that it was a lived-in, active and thriving space for community, there was still very little sign of life. Flags, neatly ordered bibles, and information notice boards of an undefinable age, were undeniably Welsh, but also pretty ghostly and unsettling when observed by themselves, with just me in the room. It was like a corner of London, unobserved for so long, had been briefly opened for ten minutes, only to be locked up again until another curious person stumbled across it. Not the case, of course, as Hywel informed me that there are regular services, but experiencing it in such a solitary way seemed to give me that impression. So I resolved next time to find a Welsh church that had some people inside.

And last Sunday, I finally managed to do just that. Capel y Boro, the chapel that first made me aware of the existence of these spaces in London, was advertising on its website that it was hosting a Plygain, which it described as a traditional candlelit carol service. It was happening on 14 January, and I resolved to go.

I had never heard of a Plygain, a word which suggests plygu, to bend (as if in prayer), but, Wikipedia offers, could come from the Latin word pullicanto, meaning ‘when the cock crows at dawn’. Either way, the service is traditionally held between 3 am and 6 am on Christmas morning, and was first recorded as taking place in the thirteenth century, and still takes place in certain parts of Wales. During a Plygain, parishioners come forward to sing carols, specifically ones relating to the crucifixion. Tradition has it that the service continues for as long as the singers succeed in not repeating the same song twice.

Evie and I entered the chapel a few minutes before it was due to start and were each handed a candle and a sheet of paper. We climbed the stairs up to the gallery and saw a room filled to the brim with seated people holding lit candles. We shuffled along, took our seats and lit our candles. The next hour or so was filled with such divine music, as choirs and smaller groups of singers took to the stage and sang in the richest harmonies that I can ever remember hearing. I was reminded that night of the twelfth-century chronicler Gerallt Gymro, and his own descriptions of the beauty of Welsh singing:

When they come together to make music, the Welsh sing their traditional songs, not in unison as is done elsewhere, but in parts, in many modes and modulations. When a choir gathers to sing, which happens often in this country, you will hear many different parts and voices as there are performers, all joining together in the end to produce a single organic harmony and melody in soft sweetness.

This observation has become cliche, perhaps, but it is an observation that nonetheless never felt truer to me than on this evening in Capel y Boro.

The service was punctuated by other songs which the congregation were then encouraged to join in with. Despite not knowing all of the melodies, the power and strength of the other surrounding voices gradually ease you into its movements, and before long you are singing each line with such assurance and strength that it is as if it is the only song you’ve ever known. Singing in a choir is one thing, but feeling oneself elevated by the spontaneous power of an unrehearsed group of people, is an extraordinary feeling, only partially undermined by my constant fear that I would either drop my candle or cause my paper lyric sheet to catch fire.

I realise now that my preconceptions about the Welsh community in London, and how it continues to be served by the Welsh chapels and churches of previous generations, were shaped by my own ignorance and cynicism. There was a desire that I would stumble upon something that would ring true to myself, and tell me something about my childhood and identity, perhaps – but I did not expect to find such clear evidence of a thriving Welsh culture in London outside of Six Nations fixtures at the London Welsh Centre.

I’m not sure what these experiences have taught me, other than to serve as a humble reminder, if ever one was needed, of the cultural reach of the Welsh, and of the depths of its roots in a place like London, where there is such space for your identity to take shape. It has also taught me of the power of the interior, both of the physical buildings themselves, but also of the imagination, the memory. It was memory and emotional and spiritual longing which caused these buildings to be here in the first place, and whether interested in the spiritual significance of these places or not, their cultural significance for Wales and what they represent to those who feel attached to such spaces is immeasurable. If nothing else, they make me feel less isolated up here, this side of the bridge.

I realise that in my two years of living in London, I have only tentatively scraped at the surface of it, the city which continues to surprise and reveal things about its inhabitants that you would not expect. Not that these things are particularly hidden – it just takes an ignited memory, and a deviation from the habits we create for ourselves, to realise that the familiar can hide itself in the most unfamiliar of places.

Rhys Underdown (he/him) is a 27-year-old bilingual writer and musician from Swansea, now based in London. His writing explores his relationship with Wales and Welshness, drawing on the inherent tension of living outside Wales. All images are by the author unless otherwise noted.

See a Mercedes-Benz 220 with the roof down. Bride and groom are standing in the back seats, greeting their family and friends. The bride waves her bouquet and with darting glances looks all about her. As she does so, the white roses in the tall, dark beehive of her hair also seem to wave to the crowds.

The newly married couple are Tim and Janet Lewis of Pontarddulais. From the Mercedes-Benz 220, they hop into a red VW Beetle, equipped with the customary clatter of used cans strung to the back bumper, and off on their honeymoon they go. No hotels, no seaside relaxation, no leisure of any kind.

Tim returns to work and takes his bride with him. They head north, stopping briefly to visit the dramatic waterfall of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, before finally reaching Bala on the other side of the Berwyn. Waiting for Tim to return from the interruption of his wedding are two of his students from Swansea College of Art, Stan Williams and Alan Figg.

They had been working together on Tim’s design for a stained-glass window. Yellow posters are up around town, advertising ARTIST AT WORK: an opportunity for the local community to witness the behind-the-scenes of an artist’s process. Tŷ Tan Domen had been their digs until the wedding. They worked there at the former boys’ school turned newspaper printer, sleeping in what had been the headmaster’s office, on the floor. On returning from his wedding, Tim and Janet are housed at Caffi’r Cyfnod, where they were are fed generous homemade meals to fuel the meticulous work.

Flash-forward to 1988.

I was mostly good at school but school was not good for me. Obedient, academic, bullied and increasingly shy, I turned up daily and steadily turned inwards. I was, however, easily wowed by beauty.

I ended up choosing History of Art as a University topic at an institution which I knew little about other than it being ‘good’ (and the prospectus was in my ‘beautiful’ pile on the living room floor). It was also all the way on the east coast of Scotland.

Beauty is usually scarce in a secondary school corridor, but not in mine. My form room was in the old wing of the school, the former girls’ grammar school. In order to walk to the morning gwasanaeth, to go to the toilets, library or reach most classes other than Cymraeg a Ffrangeg, I had to pass Tim Lewis’ stained glass window from 1969.

I much later learned that Tim had tried to secure a different location for his work of art, fearing that the south-west position would mean a lot of afternoon sunshine would be on the glass, and therefore its heat. In time, this did become a problem, just as he had predicted, but first, there was a great light hitting his window: it was an almost seven foot by four and a half foot kaleidoscope.

First, I remember the slab of colours blazing into the corridor. That window contained us as we walked to and fro. It held a power in its chosen location because if you entered the building through the main entrance and headed past the library to the headmaster’s office, it could be seen far, far ahead and with every step, grew more magnetic. Right at the end of the corridor, it drew you forward.

[Note: in a writing workshop a long time ago, I swore that I’d never use the word ‘majestic’. That it was somehow so grand that it couldn’t be believed as anything but melodrama. But here I am choosing it.]

Stained glass windows were put in churches to capture the awe and hearts of parishioners. Sunshine multiplied into a myriad colours and refracted onto our skins has an effect of making us feel touched by something beyond education, doctrine or glass. Perhaps we at Ysgol y Berwyn become aware of another connection beyond those long pale-blue walls. Perhaps it being in a school rather than a place of worship caught me off guard. Perhaps daily company with such a vehicle of light is more powerful than weekly on Sundays?

Let me describe this window. At the time, I would have said that it measured just over the height of the headmaster who sometimes stood there in his black cloak between bells, in case a child scraped or bumped into it. Unlike church windows, it wasn’t positioned high above head height but at kicking, kneeing, bumping height. Its size was just taller than the tallest person I knew, and just wider than the span of anyone’s arms. It insisted on being seen. You could face it. Bathe in it. This was Pum Plwy’ Penllyn, showing the churches of five parishes: Llanuwchllyn, Llangywer, Llanycil, Llanfor and Llandderfel. In a watery yet rainbow-like sweep uniting them, was an oval representing Llyn Tegid (Bala Lake).

As it happens, an old (unused by now, thankfully) English name for the biggest natural lake in Wales is ‘Pimble-mere’ or ‘Pemble Mere’ (1813 Cambrian Travellers’ Guide). ‘Mare’ is an Old English word for ‘lake’ in English, coming from Middle French ‘mare’. Think Windermere. ‘Penmelesmere’ was recorded by Gerald of Wales in the Itinerarium Cambriae in the twelfth century and translated in 1804 by Sir Richard Colt as Pymplwy Meer, deriving from Pump Plwyf (Five Parishes). So, this window stood to unite Penllyn in splendid colour. And in many ways, it did. Generations of children from that very circle walked back and forth in front of it; so many cheeks were blushed by its refractions.

I must have been sufficiently moved by the presence of that window in my daily life to have wanted to keep it with me when I left the school, or at least to keep a memory of it with me. I do remember trying to take a good photograph of it. I do remember the challenge: every time I clicked, someone ran past. I remember marking out each panel of colour with black pen on pieces of A4 paper sellotaped together. I then blocked the same geometric shapes with wax onto cotton – a technique called batik. I replicated the colour of each glass panel with silk paint. Once it was dry, I rolled it up at the back of the wardrobe with every intention of quilting or at least framing it. In fact, I moved to Scotland then Italy then France and forgot about the window. But I had appreciated it as a companion. I hadn’t considered how fortunate we were as pupils to have our lives elevated by a work of art of great significance. I hadn’t considered how dull other, normal school corridors were. Neither did I know the name of the artist, nor anything about his career. The window stood for nothing other than itself, until recently. For no particular reason that I can think of, I stopped and wondered: what happened to that window?

All I knew that in recent trips to the library when visiting my family in Bala, all the walls had moved. There was no space for a window in the new configuration of school walls. So, in its absence, I looked for that old batik painting of mine and I began researching. Someone had a vague memory that the artist was called Tim. I started there.

Tim Lewis studied at the Royal College of Art in London under Laurence Lee, one of the masters of the craft in Britain, and is the former head of the Stained Glass department at Swansea College of Art. I scrawled through examples of his work on Stained Glass in Wales and recognised his style immediately. Our Pum Plwy Penllyn wasn’t on the first page, nor the second, nor the third. It was missing in more ways than one then. I learned that he was one of the most important artists in the medium working in Wales in the second half of the twentieth century. This window of his in Bala was his first public commission and the earliest example of his tradition-forming, technique-forming life as an artist. Yet there was no mention of it.

One among many of his famous works is a window to remember the crew of a Mumbles lifeboat who all died in a storm at sea in 1947. Where the rhythmic shapes of saints might be expected, Tim Lewis shows man after man in a yellow raincoat, the sea in their hands at the north isle of Eglwys yr Holl Saint, Ystumllwynarth, Abertawe (All Saints Church, Oystermouth, Swansea). It is the same window which appeared on the cover of The British Art Journal’s summer issue, 2015, in which the editor declares that Martin Crampin’s book Stained Glass from Welsh Churches ‘may well be the most beautiful book ever on stained glass’.

Listening to Tim speaking on a Welsh television programme about the window, he explains how he wanted to grasp the feeling of being at sea and went out with the lifeboat himself and took part in an exercise with them. It was winter and misty. The boat swooped into the waves from the ‘house’ (he gestures this with a dramatic hand). ‘Mi ges i ryw fath o…’ he says – I had some sort of – and then he stalls and his voice quivers before saying ‘o brofiad’ – of an experience.

He wanted a window that was special to the Mumbles, not Jesus walking on the waves and quietening the sea but something unique to the tragedy. At the bottom of the window, he showed Mumbles itself. His interest in architectural features of a place is here, as they were in Pum Plwy Penllyn. The castle, lighthouse, the place where these men had lived – small houses – one particular street with interesting lines, huddled against the mountain. He shows black and white photographs of these places that were taken as field work. Most of the colour in the window comes from the blues and greens. The sea, he says, and right in the centre of the window, the tragedy. The men stand upright and strong. He specifically wanted to show them this way. Dynion cryf, dynion cadarn.

Here is Tim Lewis the social observer and then Tim Lewis the artist. He speaks of his pencil next, and gestures not as if swooshing a boat into splashing waters but a delicate pen, slowly carving a line in air. He draws shapes as though for lead or glass by nature now, he says. It comes over time. He thinks in this method. In his gesture, I see how he imagines the matter of his material and is somehow in union with it.

[Dear reader: I am listening to Tim’s explanation of the details in this window, the real life world of the Mumbles and its tragedy, his experience in the grasp of the sea, and his wish to show the men in strength when my phone beeps and Tim’s daughter informs me that tonight, Tim Lewis passed away. He is both alive in his work and there is also this news. May this appreciation of his line and light of beauty reach you. May you visit some of his windows, listed on Stained Glass in Wales’ website.]

Let me introduce you to some. First, the Round Window in Stanwell School, Penarth. They are luckier than Ysgol y Berwyn and the window still survives. Tim’s granddaughter studied here and was able to live a little with her grandfather’s representation of the phases of the moon imprinted in the school’s daytime sky. Secondly, consider visiting In Adoration of our Senses, also at the Eglwys yr Holl Saint, Ystumllwynarth and Christian Symbols at Eglwys yr Holl Sant/Church of All Saints, Rhiwbina, Cardiff: windows to linger under. I also want to mention the windows in the Chapel of Remembrance, Coychurch Crematorium, Bridgend, made by staff, students and distinguished visiting artists of the Stained Glass Department of Swansea College of Art. The Four Seasons windows there by former student Roger Hayman are a set of four tall window with vigorous abstract designs – on a good day, you will be saturated by colour, just as I was as a school pupil in Ysgol y Berwyn. The cloister windows at the crematorium include a long line of memorial windows designed by Tim Lewis, Alan Figg, John Edwards, Mark Angus, Yanos Boujioucos, Amber Hiscott, David Pearl, Lydia Marouf and Janet Hardy (1970s work), while the opposite windows are by four masters of a post-war renaissance in Germany – Ludwig Schaffrath, Joachim Klos, Johannes Schreiter and Jochem Poesgen (1979-82). There are also windows by Christian Ryan and Alexander Beleschenko (1983). May all the seasons of life be remembered when we are grieving. May all who grieve witness beauty like this and be held by it.

Most of Tim Lewis’ work is to be seen in the Swansea area, south Wales at the furthest, but nobody knows why he was matched with Bala for the Artist at Work project. One other window commissioned for The Open University in Milton Keynes, showing a blazing sun with its rays intertwining outwards, is also lost (at the time of writing). Does care diminish with distance?

Glue certainly weakens with time.

Share Cwlwm

Tim Lewis was right about his reservations regarding the location chosen for Pum Plwy Penllyn at Ysgol y Berwyn. It was so often in the line of light at its strongest. Colour and line in this large, immersive work were at their best in the glare, but the glue was not. So, this is where we reach an interesting point in Tim Lewis’ developing technique at that time. He is known for an approach to stained-glass windows which was new in the 1960s. Those familiar with textile techniques will know of appliqué work: when pieces of fabric are sewn or stuck onto a larger piece to form a picture or pattern. This method was used in ancient Egypt to adorn garments and household items. The very same principle, applied to glass, is what Tim Lewis saw as a creative solution that created new, dynamic possibilities in bending light. No lead was used in his windows. Light in weight and light in lustre, Tim Lewis’ style and technique was given its first public commission away from home and in Penllyn.

This appliqué technique is so often discussed in a context that leaves Wales out. This article is a small step to rectify that. Tim Lewis was not alone in pursuing a new approach to capturing glass without the weight of lead. The bonding of coloured glass to plate glass with an adhesive like this (usually epoxy resin) was used in other locations in the 1960s. When the parish church of Blackburn was enlarged and embellished to serve as the Anglican cathedral, a huge lantern-spire was created. This octagonal lantern was designed by Laurence King with the aim of flooding the alter below with light from eight richly-coloured windows. The commission for the large octagonal glazing scheme was given to John Hayward who created what was possibly the largest group of windows in the UK carried out in appliqué glass. His method, described by Norman H. Tennent resembles that which Janet Lewis has mentioned in conversation – of washing each separate, small slither of glass before application. Tennent writes about keeping the pieces under cover before assembly (no dust, presumably). During the laying-up and use of the epoxy resin adhesive, the temperature was maintained at about 21°C. The epoxy resin and hardener were measured out using hypodermic syringes with a third syringe used to apply the resin mixture to the glass. He writes about the dark lines made with a ‘cement-silversand mixture to which a polyester resin was added’ and this chimes with Stan Williams memories of a product named ‘slate’ being used in this context (appropriate for Wales – I got a little excited when at first we thought real slate was in it but no). In the case of the Blackburn Cathedral, the first piece of glass became detached in September 1970.

Subscribe now

Sheffield Cathedral and St John the Evangelist Church, Eastbourne had appliqué windows by Keith New. They, like Blackburn Cathedral, suffered the same fate: the glass-to-glass bond began to fail within a few years. Now, none of these windows remain. Conservation was deemed unrealistic. On the other hand, the sculptor E. Bainbridge Copnall was commissioned to design and create an outdoor screen commemorating the life of Sir Winston Churchill for a shopping precinct in Dudley near the city of Birmingham in the mid 1960s. in this case, conservation proved unsatisfactory and a few pannels of the original appliqué work, Churchill Memorial Screen remain in storage with no current plans for redisplay. Glass, like light itself, in some cases has proven to be ephemeral.

Let me return to the case of the Blackburn octagonal lantern-spire. A stained-glass conservation consultant proposed using a more durable adhesive. John Hayward, the artist himself, considered reversing the glass and providing an exterior protection. However, it was also Hayward’s view that, ‘in the event that a decision is made to replace the existing glass, the appliqué panels should be destroyed rather than stored’ based on the important principle for Hayward ‘which has something to do with not clinging to the wreckage once the ship has gone down’.

We are in the process of considering the restoration of Pum Plwy Penllyn. Based on this, with a heavy heart, some might agree with Hayward’s comment in the late 1980s that we should let broken glass lie. Indeed the price will seem prohibitive, as is the fact that there is no longer space for the window where it used to be, and as a relic of sorts by now, we might consider Tim Lewis’ original caution as well as the headmaster’s fear of passing feet. So where else might the window go? With no home, it’s difficult to even begin a restoration project at any price. However, it is no longer the 1980s. Luckily, our window was not destroyed. It remains, albeit in pieces, in bubble wrap and safe. Opening corners of the wrapping and peeking at the combination of colour and cracks, the current headmistress of Ysgol Godre’r Berwyn (the school’s new name) and I were both stunned. It is so very beautiful. It is so very damaged. Whenever it was taken out of its original home in the school corridor, it wasn’t done so with the same awe as we felt faced by its beauty. Brute force was used. It’s hard to understand how human hands might have done this. But we have not lost the window. We are reassured that the adhesive now used for appliqué glass work is a world apart from that which the 1960s artists used. So much of the early appliqué work of that time is now lost. Pum Plwy Penllyn doesn’t have to be among them. For now, light does not travel through its coloured glass but I for one would like to again be saturated in how Tim Lewis saw our community. This time, glue will not grow old.

1969. Tim and Janet Lewis have arrived at Caffi’r Cyfnod. Cake and cups on Formica tables. Friends take up their work again. How much work is still to be done, how the public are responding to witnessing the process. Janet is recruited to wash the meticulously cut morsels of glass, yet to be applied to the sheet glass in Tim’s design.

The making of Pum Plwy’ Penllyn meant driving around the plwyfi (parishes) and photographing the churches there, much as Tim Lewis had done in Mumbles for the Lifeboat Window. I imagining him choosing his angles and lines just like the lifeboat men’s homes. He and his students made small panels of each church, practicing their facades, turning their stone faces into bright colours: a fiery orange for Llanycil, greens of mosses for Llanfor. One such panel remains with Tim’s family: an early appliqué practice piece of Llanycil in blue and yellow, bubbles visible in the coloured glass as the light shines through it. There will be other practice panels out there in the community somewhere. They were given away to local people as thankyous and parting gifts, so I am told. Still, nobody locally has any memory of them. Should anyone read this article and think: I’ve seen something a bit like that at the back of a drawer somewhere, please, do get in touch. We would like to see these small panels exhibited together as a family, or at least know if they survived.

The wedding video ends with window building. The large, seven-foot-tall structure has many of the coloured church bricks in place, but they are held together with gaps. Llyn Tegid is missing so the churches float in the air. Tim Lewis steps to the glass so that he can position one sunshine orange little panel on Llandderfel church. He then steps out of the camera shot and we see no more.

An exhibition, Pum Plwy Penllyn, showing the work of Tim Lewis will be at Capel Plase, Stryd y Plase, Y Bala, September 12th - October 3rd 2025.

It was just after Christmas last year that Cwlwm took its first tentative step into the world of e-newsletters, with an opening editorial that outlined briefly the kind of publication we hoped to become:

Cwlwm will collect and curate personal essays, fragments of experience hint at the whole. We will explore and uncover lesser known places and platform lesser heard voices. We will publish analysis of current events but look beyond the demands of the news cycle, and review with a critical eye Wales’ cultural production. Here our diverse communities will meet and mix and mingle; merge, collide and intersect. We will examine our differences and what makes each part of our country unique in order to identify the ties that bind us. Our focus will always be people.

A year later, we enter our denouement – a moment of untangling, if you will – as we prepare, at least for now, for a period of hiatus.

So where does one start? First, with you: all 800 of you. You’ve read 78 of our articles, between you, over 70,000 times. To every one of you who has enjoyed, commented on, shared, or connected with the writing we have published over the last year: diolch yn fawr. To our writers and contributors, especially those who didn’t think they were writers before: diolch o galon.

There has been so much excellent writing in Cwlwm over the last year that we thought it made sense to bring as much of it together as is sensible in a single newsletter. Despite its incredible diversity, there have been some themes. We’ve tried to sum these up as best as we can below and in doing so, we hope that you’re able to revisit some of your favourites, or catch up on pieces that were published before you subscribed.

Writing of now

Wales is alive with stories – that is why we started Cwlwm. We kicked things off in 2024 with James Bessant Davies’ coverage of Brecon’s Christmas celebrations and continued, across the year, to engage with events happening across Wales. By this we didn’t just mean the comings and goings of politics in Cardiff Bay (although there was plenty) or the big cultural set pieces, but the things happening all over and at all scales. It was a pleasure to feature M. Yesekaon’s piece about setting up a hip-hop studio in Colwyn Bay and the community that surrounds it. At the height of summer, Kit Habianic took us up abandoned spoil tips to learn about nature conservation efforts in these unique ecosystems. And in one of the most discussed pieces of the year, Tim Price made a passionate case for better arts funding with an argument that has one again become timely.

Writing the past

We come to know the present through the past; Wales is a nation steeped in (some would say smothered by) history. So many of our writers have written movingly and persuasively about coming to know more about their own Wales in the present through another one in the past. Sara Wheeler took us through her family’s history in Rhosllannerchrugog, marking the decline of traditional industry – but also the other forces that give the village life. Our most-read piece of 2024 was Roger Reese’s account of the history of the railway in Talyllyn, Powys and the recent community efforts to remember it in the world’s smallest railway museum. We both contributed pieces on connectivity and transport: Dylan writing about the phonebox in his home village of Pennorth and Merlin about the charm of charmless places, and walking on abandoned railway lines. In the heart of the capital, Emmet Moore chronicled a changing city through the fate of the Capitol theatre and subsequent shopping centre.

Untangling

We major on the metaphor at Cwlwm, and our favourite one is the knottiness of Wales and writing’s place as the celebrator, but also untangler, of the muddle that is our nation. Merlin wrote in our early days about his own milltir sgwâr on the Welsh border, and how a wider vocabulary of border words can unlock a greater understanding of this overlooked part of the country. John Briggs, more recently, has teased out a life lived in the local in his photographical retrospective of Newport’s pubs. Sometimes, what we are trying to untangle is ourselves: Polly Grace wrote movingly about growing up, place and family and her own lifelong relationship with the idea of Wales. On the other side of the continent, Silvia Rose immersed herself in Serbian hospitality and found herself thinking sometimes of home in Eryri. And on its twenty-fifth anniversary, Dylan pulled together the lost history of one of Wales’ most famous photographs, as we published it in colour for the first time.

Journeys

The best stories are tall tales of a long journey, and you can sometimes be surprised by what you find out along the way. Rhys Underdown took us with him around the Gower peninsula, recounting a trip made a few years ago with a good friend. Merlin visited Severnside to find out about a land that straddles a wild, wide river. And we joined Richard Huw Morgan for his sideways take on the National Eisteddfod in Pontypridd, via bridges, stone walls, and solar farms. Finally, Jasmine Donahaye took us to Cumbria in search of Rheged, lost in the maze of archival material.

All about people

In the summer, we wrote that Wales is all that we are: everything that we are makes up Wales. Cwlwm, first and foremost, is a celebration of all the people of Wales and all that we do, but we do this in our specificity, not in the broad brushstrokes of national pride. First, Tina Rogers took us into the heart of ‘quirky Chirky’ with its misfits and cowboys. A refugee from Turkey gave us a vital, first-person insight into life as an asylum seeker in Wales, living in a hotel room. Hedydd Ioan considered the energy of y werin (folk), and the relationship between folk and rap in Wales. Claire Boot explored the religious and social history of Penrhys, a community situated at a holy site high up in the Valleys. And Faisal Ali talked to players in the Butetown football scene about the game, the place, and Wales.

It’s a veritable smorgasbord of content this week, more than enough to keep you going on these dark and cold winter weekends. Please dive in and enjoy some of these ‘back stories’ and share them with your friends, either directly or via social media.

We’ve got a few more pieces in the pipeline to take us through the rest of January, so keep your eyes on your inbox over the next three Saturdays.

And if you’ve got an idea for your own Cwlwm story, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Reply to this email or contact merlin@cwlwm.org and/or dylan@cwlwm.org to float your idea. We’re not able to pay for stories at present, but can help you reach 800 readers right across Wales and beyond.

I first knew this place as Kitty Flynn’s, and revelled in the knowledge that Kitty had been legendary landlady of another great Cardiff boozer: the Royal Oak, just off Newport Road near the Beresford Road bridge, the gateway to Splott. That was where a group of us – disparate misfits and scumbags from the lower leagues of the local poetry scene – once drank Lloyd Robson on his way, when the city’s last great chronicler left for a new life in America.

Being fifteen years younger, you had always known it as The Cambrian Tap, a bar adorned with low hanging vintage industrial lighting and exposed brick walls. I still missed the – equally inauthentic – Irish pub mahogany and mirrors.

Between our sporadic visits, the place had come to symbolise something – its refit and change of name exemplifying our differing experiences of the capital. Partly it expressed a generational divide between us: me on the cusp of X and Y, you of Y and Z; mainly it demonstrated just how much Wales in general and Cardiff in particular had changed in the decade and a half since I was your age.

But then somehow I stumbled across the fact that The Cambrian Tap is not some hipster aberration; in fact, the pub on the left-hand corner of the entrance to the capital’s most celebrated row of fast food eateries has been returned, almost, to its original name.

Opening as The Cambrian Hotel in 1830, the pub is the eighth oldest in the city centre. It was in the 1880s that Samuel Arthur Brain entered into a partnership with his uncle, Joseph Benjamin Brain, to form Cardiff’s most famous brewing company. The pair swiftly acquired and rebuilt the Cambrian and extended the capacity of the Old Brewery onto the surrounding land – hence the modern naming of the ‘new’ Brewery Quarter complex of bars and eateries, opened in 2003.

Looking through the cross-hatched muntins onto Caroline Street provides a classic Cardiff juxtaposition: twenty-first-century nightlife through nineteenth-century architectural detailing. It’s a view that says something important about the nature of a city that never stops reinventing itself.

When I first began to draft notes for this article one wall of the Cambrian Tap was plastered in a photomontage of Cardiff sporting heroes past and present. Jim Driscoll, Fred Keenor, Billy Boston, Terry Yorath, Colin Jackson, Craig Bellamy. Despite being up to date – with the Whitchurch triumvirate of Sam Warburton, Gareth Bale and Geraint Thomas all represented – there was something of a twentieth century disregard for diversity about the display. Not a single woman. It perhaps proves the point that I am trying to make that the montage has already been replaced, painted over with a dragon and HEN WLAD FY NHADAU in massive letters, leaving punters in no doubt where they are.

Subscribe now

This is how our conversation goes. We are in a window booth. Royal blue leather upholstery on short benches like an American diner has replaced the wooden furniture of yesteryear. In truth, this is how all our conversations go, returning always after digression upon digression to under-researched cultural criticism of our country and city.

Once you have accepted the credo that ‘culture is ordinary’ it is impossible not to indulge the devotional practice of cultural criticism at all times. We may have only gone for a pint and a chat about Cwlwm, but what we drink and where is steeped in history and cultural practice.

The windows, the walls, the lighting, the characters congregating at the bar, the drunks drifting in from the street, the neon signs for takeaways and the meals served within them all fall into scope, drawn into the maelstrom of our analysis. This city of murky canals and docks and coal and race riots and million pound cheques and pubs knocked down for student flats and hen-and-stag-dos and call-centres and new-build housing estates is endlessly interesting, precisely because it never stops changing. Names of pubs are the thin end of the wedge.

And there’s something bracing about sitting still at the centre of it all. Here, across the road from the station, and in the crosshairs between the castle and the docks, the Betty Campbell statue and Dorothy’s Fish Bar, we find ourselves, to paraphrase James Joyce, In The Heart of the Cambrian Metropolis.

Drinking and thinking about Cardiff – the way the city’s layered histories form a palimpsest for our own chequered pasts – reminds me of how all this started, with a book called Cardiff Central. Published by Gomer in 2003, it was a slim volume edited by Francesca Rhydderch that collected ten essays from some of the late twentieth century’s best writers about the capital.

Lloyd Robson was in it, obviously, in his early noughties pomp – but so too was Dannie Abse, by then nearing the end of his remarkable life and career. Kaite O’Reilly wrote about the Grangetown Irish. Gillian Clarke wrote about the animal wall. Stella Schiller Levey wrote about the Jewish community. Leonora Brito, now available in Penguin’s Black Britain series, was in it too. And John Williams, who had recently completed his Cardiff Trilogy. As was Gwyneth Lewis, not yet the inaugural National Poet of Wales who would go on – the following year – to caption the Butetown skyline.

The book arrived in the same year that the Old Brewery became a leisure destination, and a year after Peter Finch – another contributor – had published the first of his Real Cardiff books. ‘Something is happening here, but we don’t know what it is,’ Finch had memorably asked in his Planet essay that became first a book and then a series of books, ‘do we, Mrs Jones?’

Share

Something had happened, of course. There were facts: the devolution referendum had passed – just! – and Wales now had a National Assembly. The rugby team was, after a long period in the doldrums, doing well. There were the bands: Manic Street Preachers, Catatonia, Stereophonics, Super Furry Animals, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. And the films: Twin Town, Human Traffic, Solomon and Gaenor. A country of three million people which had, after defeat in the class war of the miners strike, become a post-industrial wasteland, was emerging into the new millennium with a newfound cultural confidence and a slew of internationally recognised actors, singers and sportspeople. This was the media story. They called it Cool Cymru.

But there was something going on at street-level, too. And for many, including me, at a personal level. That was what I tried to capture in my own first attempt at serious writing. ‘Becoming Welsh in ‘99’ was a self-conscious attempt to write an eleventh essay for Cardiff Central. I took it along to some workshops Lloyd Robson was running for 16-24-year-olds at the old BBC studio on Newport high street (I was 24 at the time) and after he showed enthusiasm for it, I decided to self-publish it in a zine.

CFUK became the vehicle for my own writing about Cardiff and Wales, but also for a new generation of writers (including some of those scumbags and misfits who later gathered in the Royal Oak) to express what they felt about what was happening. The zine existed in the lowest possible echelons of a Welsh literary world that even at its zenith was pretty low key. I managed to get interviews with the likes of Rachel Trezise, Owen Sheers, John Williams and Niall Griffiths, all of whom had deals with London publishers, but most of the original creative work and reviews were by people like me (twentysomethings living in small flats in unfashionable parts of Cardiff, with no track record and little hope of a publishing deal in Bridgend or Cardigan, let alone in London).

In time, the punkish zine energy of CFUK gave way to the more refined, more self-consciously highbrow pages of The Raconteur, which was less focused on Cardiff and Wales. That magazine ran for six issues and was a collaboration with Gary Raymond, whom I had met at the Sherman Theatre where he read some poems before a short play by my old school friend Owen Thomas. As the noughties became the 2010s and publishing online became the inevitable choice for those of us whose main aim was simply to get our work out there, there followed the Wales Arts Review. After that, I edited the welsh agenda for the Institute of Welsh Affairs, and then over this last year, Cwlwm. But it all began with CFUK, a hundred copies colour photocopied at home in a tiny Llanishen maisonette, and printed at Mailboxes on Wellfield Road.

A full twenty years after I first traipsed around Cardiff hawking copies of CFUK to cafes for £1, the literary landscape looks very different. The magazines we variously enjoyed and envied and sought to usurp – Planet and New Welsh Review – have entered different kinds of dormancy. Wales Arts Review has called it a day. the welsh agenda is only available as a pdf. Devolution brought the so-called ‘bonfire of the quangos’; we’ve now witnessed the bonfire of the magazines.

There are new things on the horizon, of course. There always are. Wales needs a magazine for the exposed brick and low hanging vintage industrial lighting generation. The mahogany and mirrors are in a skip out the back.

CFUK was inspired by the DIY aesthetic of 1970s punk. The Raconteur harked back further, to the great ‘little magazines’ of print’s golden age: The Little Review, Horizon, The Paris Review and Granta. Wales Arts Review created a digital platform for discussion of the arts in Wales. Cwlwm has embraced Substack to deliver longform stories from across the country via a weekly e-newsletter.

Subscribe now

In my opening editorial for the first edition of The Raconteur, I wrote:

… the act of founding a printed literary quarterly in 2009 must be even more foolhardy than it would already appear. In our accelerated culture, a quarterly magazine will always be behind the times.

I went on:

Often the literary landscape is formed only after the political and cultural fires have cooled. Novelists often deal with subjects and contexts at the remove of a generation or more. The novels of the past quarter-century most frequently tipped to last certainly bear out this theory. Midnight’s Children, the Booker of Bookers, concerns a particular moment in time more than half a century ago. The Remains of the Day, Empire of the Sun and Atonement have the Second World War hanging over them like a dark cloud in the same way that Birdsong and Regeneration draw on the First. In America, Underworld reflects on the Cold War era and Beloved deals with slavery… Broadly speaking, most serious-minded literary novels are set at some point in the past… All of which helps us conclude that the most useful point of observation for a novelist is with the benefit of hindsight; it is nigh on impossible to see the now for what it is when we ourselves are necessarily contained within it.

For twenty years, I have tried to capture the present and shape the future. I have tried to describe and analyse and capture the changes in Welsh culture and society through articles, blogs, essays, interviews and reviews; op-eds, polemic, comment and analysis; memoir, travel and journalism; occasional short stories and poems. I have tried, with others, to create spaces for other writers to do this too, to thrive and to have their say.

It’s an age-old artistic impulse, to rip it up and start again; an age-old human impulse, at the turning of the year, to do things differently. To turn over a new leaf.

But I realise now that all those new leaves have been part of the same book. I’ve been refitting and rebranding the same old pub, and trying to make sense of Cardiff since I arrived here as an ingenuous undergraduate in 1998.

Now suddenly the calendar says it’s 2025. The political and cultural fires have cooled. It is, finally, time to venture out of the pub and out of the pages of yet another periodical, into The Heart of the Cambrian Metropolis. It’s time to write The Novel.

In The Heart of the Cambrian Metropolis

A Joycean odyssey through the streets of Cardiff, by Dylan Moore

By The Cambrian Metropolis

Dylan Moore is co-editor of Cwlwm. His new project is In The Heart of the Cambrian Metropolis.

Y filltir sgwâr (‘the square mile’) is a Welsh phrase which, according to David Austin, ‘signifies the small locality in which one grew up and lived and from which a core identity and belonging is drawn. It bespeaks a close-knit community of mutual support, kinship, and neighbourliness. As such it is an emotional and perhaps romantic response to the space around people, but it can nonetheless be drawn on a map. It is, therefore, a way into a landscape for an historian such as myself from both an individual and a collective perspective’.

Our experience of landscape is never singular or individual, precious as it is; it is part of many intersecting personal, ancestral, historic, embodied, precarious layers. My love of vintage style, not vintage values, extends beyond my clothing. I love the English country house aesthetic; the sweeping lawns, Lutyens benches, delphinium, hollyhocks, drifts of lavender humming with bees, weathered terracotta pots of peonies. It’s straw hats with trailing ribbons, trugs and Sissinghurst, foxgloves standing at the back of the borders. Chatsworth, Blenheim, the Lost Gardens of Heligan and sunken rose gardens blooming in the late afternoon sun, the haze of perfume so visceral you can almost see it floating towards you.

I love the art that’s been made from landscape, the tending and devotion that’s shaped green living things into something beautiful, shapely, stately and far from wild but still captivating. I hate the wealth that built these landscapes, of course: the violence of enslavement and the coal extracted from the earth taking health and wealth with it, leaving only carbon and slag behind.

I grew up walking the grounds of Tredegar House, my school uniform crest carried the Tredegar stag. Many people believe Wales wasn’t involved in the enslavement of people. Some say that Wales was the first place colonised by England but even with all the travesties perpetrated, I don’t believe these things are comparable. Actually, research shows Wales didn’t have the wealth to mount long transatlantic enslavement raids and shipping voyages. But the Tredegar Morgans who lived for 500 years in Tredegar House, were, along with other prominent Welsh families, investors in the Royal African Company, ‘a chartered monopoly that held exclusive rights to trade with West Africa and therefore to export enslaved humans to the Caribbean. The Morgans were shareholders’ writes Dr Chris Evans. I cannot look at these spaces without seeing the bodies they have been built on, all that broke to allow these lawns to be this smooth, the trees this stately, the vistas this sweet. It’s impossible for me to divorce the beauty from its context.

But I visited these gardens as a child and I loved the peace, the spaciousness, the time away from people; as a child with undiagnosed sensory needs, this was cherished. But of course, we had to leave those gardens and go home. They were not ours. There were gates; people were welcomed in and then put out again. Even as a small child, I knew that it felt wrong that the land could be owned by someone, that it could be fenced in and others fence out. I felt this, even living in the green and pleasant south-east Wales, surrounded as I was by forest and two fields away from the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal. I love photos where I am in a green, beautiful place – hazy, unspecific, open, generous, sweeping. But that’s not my reality and it’s not the landscape I’m in a relationship with every day.

I contributed to an anthology of Welsh writers a few years ago and we were asked where we wrote, so it could be included in our piece. Perhaps I am endlessly parochial and pedestrian but I was somewhat confused by how special people’s writing places proved to be; a houseboat on the Menai Straits, an antique Edwardian desk, in an attic overlooking Conwy Bay, between London and Singapore. I could write nothing but my reality, not between anywhere, not an antique anything but from a council flat in the south Wales valleys. It felt bald, it felt disruptive, it felt like spoiling the party, the picture of aesthetic, creative, aspirational spaces.

But I love this home which reminds me of my grandmother’s home. It isn’t aspirational, it is a valleys village with potholed roads, libraries and facilities closing and many people using foodbanks. I’ve been harassed in these streets, grown stronger, grown weaker and been unable to access them for years, being able to see the sunset from the mountain again. Planted trees and grew a garden. Lived to eat the fruit from those trees and to share it.

Share

The soil here is nearly pure clay. Older folks have told me how they used to come down to the land I now live on to get milk from Mr Jones, who owned the farm. He used the dipper into the churns and filled up their milk bottles if they came early. Our flat was built in the fifties, post war, with green space around it and a garden which has blossomed with roses, honeysuckle, peonies, daffodils, fruit and flowers everywhere you can fit a plant.

Grandma has a map on her kitchen wall. Everything had to be located; when we talked, everything was understood. We would look words up in her ancient King’s English dictionary, with the cracked brown leather cover and peeling gold lettering on the spine. We ate with atlases, poetry books, encyclopaedias and maps surrounding us. Grandma initially hated our smartphones and refused to get wifi in the house for many years to keep books as the primary source of information and to preserve talking, questioning and wondering. As I grew up, my sense of the world map expanded, becoming populated with stories, memories, information and understanding. But my embodied experience of the world was limited by lack of access. Growing up with chronic illness and from a working-class background, travel was confined to library books rather than aeroplanes. ‘We live in an area of outstanding natural beauty,’ my mother would remind us. ‘People come on holiday here.’ I had a visceral sense of the landmarks around my home, the lanes and hills, their stories and legends and our own family and ancestral lore laid on top of them. We mapped changes in how far we could walk as we grew, as the trees grew and fell around us.

But as I became more and more unwell, my capacity to explore the external world reduced and my adventures in our internal worlds, our emotions, our stories, increased. ‘People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.’ wrote Ursula K. Le Guin and I began to explore the fantastical creatures we are as humans, in writing and in therapy, realising I may not be able to explore adventuring out in the world, no dragons guarding hordes of gold but I needed to face internal fears that appeared as what most scares and overwhelms us.

On Sunday, Grandma asked me, as she does most weeks, ‘Have you been looking at moon lately?’ I had not. She was not pleased. ‘I miss the moon when I’ve not seen it. I say goodnight to it every night but I have to hunt as it moves around. It’s been rising over my bedroom, over the garage, so I could see it lately.’ The moon, the forests, the plants are friendly companions. She asked me once, putting down the newspaper.

‘Grace, when people say they want to “get back to nature,” what are they talking about?’

‘Well, you know. Getting in touch with nature again. Being outside, the seasons.’

She looked flummoxed. ‘But how can they be out of touch with nature?’

I looked at her. Thinking of the farmhouse she was brought up in, roughly partitioned with the cows wintering on the other side, going to sleep to the sound of their gentle sighs and cud chewing. How she went vegetarian when the village pig was slaughtered, after she and her friends grew up with him, used to lie in the straw, their heads resting on his big belly, laughing and chatting. I thought of her fear when we travel to Cardiff or Bristol, because it’s too far. How unnatural planes and boats are to her, whose travel was limited to the rough cattle ship ferries to and from Ireland. I thought of trying to explain cities and technologies and being cut off.

‘Not everyone is like you,’ I tried. ‘People don’t walk through the woods every day. They don’t grow flowers or make bread.’ Her square mile is deep, layered with the years of her life in this place, ancestors and descendants recalling and making stories along the lanes she walks.

When I first ventured outside after being housebound for many years, I saw it as being like Google Maps loading. For years I had explored the outside via Google Maps, videos, stories, now my internal map began to expand, getting filled in as I found accessible places I could travel to and be within. A new hospital, a library, a college, a new city. Finding an accessible bus route, a train route and which staff didn’t mind putting down ramps. As I am expanding, Grandma, in her ageing, had to handle the emotional and physical impact of the world she can access being reduced. She retreats now more into story, the worlds contained in page and memory.

It had been said – but is mostly a myth – that ancient maps would contain the phrase, ‘Here be dragons’ for places that were unknown or uncharted. It is only the Ostrich Egg Globe and the Hunt-Lenox Globe of 1508 which use the phrase hic sunt dracones, ‘here are dragons’. The phrase used by medieval cartographers was Hic Svnt Leones – here are lions – to show unknown territories on maps.

Subscribe now

I think of the Jewish sea monster, Leviathan, ‘On ancient maps, cartographers would draw a Leviathan to mark uncharted waters …. Moving under cover of darkness, unperceived, this technology of fugitivity is practiced by those whose existence has been criminalized and controlled. The Leviathan is a friend, lover, and protector of those escaping enslavement and incarceration. In Hebrew, the word “Leviatan,” can be translated as “accompanier of the feminine”,’ Rebekah Erev wrote. I love the image of the fugitive within the map, the unknown within the attempt to pin down and make known, that which we experience even if it cannot be seen.

I am fascinated by maps as I am by diagnosis, because it is a professional opinion formed into an authority. Someone has mapped a person, a body, an experience, a region and framed their understanding on paper. These papers, and the understanding, often change. Diagnoses change: for example, many people identified as ‘Aspie’ but Asperger’s Syndrome was reclassified by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013, due to indistinct diagnostic criteria, as autism spectrum disorder. And it came to light through the research of Edith Sheffer that Asperger, although not an official member of the party, had his research shaped by Nazism and sent children he pathologized to their deaths. Names like that need changing. But many diagnoses are simply the best medical opinion thus far and likely to be influenced by research and medical breakthroughs.

My own relationship to my square mile is defined and redefined by both internal and external factors. By symptom flares, by work pressure, by climate crisis, by poor pavements, by harassment. I’ve had to redefine my concept of range in the context of chronic illness. I can’t explore further when a relapsing remitting pattern means I keep re-going over the same ground. Progress within my world looks different when you relapse, when you live with limitations. I wish I could tell you that having a smaller physical range has led to a deeper emotional and sensory range. But this isn’t that kind of story.

In mapping my square mile, I witness daily changes in the places within my reach. By noticing these small shifts in both my landscape and myself, my relationship with this space deepens through cherishing and attention. Yet, inevitably, someone will frame this as ‘inspirational’, commenting how ‘you can always find something to smile about’ or ‘if you can do it, anyone can.’ They'll muse about how interesting it is that my limited mobility makes me ‘really cherish what I have,’ bookmarking the corrosive pity with, ‘it just goes to show...’. What is shown by coaxing joy from struggle is never articulated.

It does not show anything beyond a dismaying lack of accessible pavements, transport and built environments. I am making what I can from this but don’t think that makes it enough. I want the same rights to access this world as anyone else. It is not about the small things, nor positive thinking; the joy I manage to create doesn’t compensate for exclusion; it’s not about slowing down and realising. This is the mistake people make and it baffles me. They celebrate my limits and that I can make a life within them rather than challenging them and imagining the lives we can all make beyond them. I do celebrate my life, but it’s not my resilience I celebrate as I don’t want to be praised for being good at getting hurt and surviving. Least people believe it is then alright to keep hurting me, since I spin such gold from the dross of suffering. But I ask, what could I spin with wool and not this straw they handed me? I do celebrate creativity and cherishing and community bringing to life our bodies and the spaces we occupy.

There’s so much pressure to be positive, to be inspirational, to say it’s fine, it doesn’t matter I can’t get to the loo or see the view, I get to see the backs of people’s heads and their untrimmed nostril hair as they face down at me – I’m just happy to be here. I’m so sorry but no.

There is an interplay between limitation and expansion. Each morning, I go out and pluck fallen leaves from the tiny pond. The pond is actually a butler’s sink we found in the garden fifteen years ago. It’s been a flower bed, where I grew anemones in velvety amethyst and carnation, all the cool colours of the paint box. It sat beside my green bench, holding a deity statue and Encens D’Auroville sticks of basil and clementine incense I stuck into the earth for daily meditation attempts. But of course, the drainage was poor and so it leaned against the water butt for many years. This summer, I dragged the sink out and sat it next to the bench, next to the fig trees and propped it up on ceramic pot feet, which I was given in a huge tub at the tip. Raising the sink gives space underneath for toads to hide, for the potential for newts. I needed a plug to fill the hole, universal plugs do not fit. I wanted to fill my pond, because I wanted to make this small difference. I wanted to believe that small could make a difference.

My therapist has been telling me for many months to go out to the garden. I talked, in sessions, about the fears I hold. I talked about trying to influence climate policy, about the impact of climate breakdown, the confluence of cascading collective trauma. They name the fires, you know, I tell her. In the US, they are so big and burn for so long, they name them. My friend was driving through California and was telling our writing group, and the others asked her how the fires were, when she drove past; the Creek Fire, I mean. Imagine a fire so big it is part of the landscape and they name it?

But she told me, go out into the garden. ‘I can’t do it’ I said. ‘I can’t play a little garden, while the mountains burn around me, while the seas rise, while people suffer, suffer in genocide. I can’t imagine playing, making gardens, making pretty posies while the world burns around me.’

A few years ago, there was a spate of wildfires in Wales. I was in Llantarnum Grange seeing clients and we could smell the smoke from Twmbarlwm, which is the mountain under which I grew up. We were told to stay inside, to keep the windows closed; the news reported it was teenagers, disconnected, discontented, lighting what they call grass fires. They spread across the mountains, up and down the valleys like lit fuses of dynamite, rocketing through our forests and green hills. But my therapist told me about her farm, how since she has been there the last few years, the swallows have come back, the house martins are returning. I thought of the birds I have seen flying over her farm, hearing the owls as dusk settled in.

I filled the pond with water until it rippled over the edges, figuring it would evaporate a little. I added a complicated solar-powered fountain, which initially sprayed so vigorously no water went back into the pond. It made a lovely tinkling noise. I ordered a tiny water lily to oxygenate it. My utter joy the day it flowered was miraculous, even for me to behold, preoccupied as I am with pain. I go out each morning, eager to see what the pond is doing, to hear the fountain playing. I once saw a pond skater on its surface. There are bird feathers, tiny ones, on the rim, so I think birds are drinking from it. We have a bird bath too and a bird table but a big black cat has adopted the covered bird table as his outdoor shelter when it rains.

Share

But I sat on the bench and saw the trees we planted together and when the pond was ready. To hear the fountain playing, to sit and look at this little patch of land so surrounded now by trees that you can look up and instead of being hemmed in by flats, square by square around us, windows winking at every turn, we can now look up and see only leaves and sky.

The more I am out in my square mile, the more I am in community. I am in relationship with the land, the trees, with neighbours and local community members. And look, it’s the valleys. Yes, I get asked questions about my impairments, my dogs, when the bus is coming, the weather. And yet there are many disabled people on my estate. I am one of two wheelchair users on my road. My direct neighbours on our block are all disabled. And of course I’m asked less about disability as I age – perhaps it’s not as startling to see a woman as it is a young person in a wheelchair, or perhaps attitudes have improved through my lifetime (this isn’t true, I know from young disabled community members, but I wish it were).

These connections have reshaped my identity. I can be limited by the square mile or rooted in it; I can be constrained or held and contained – sometimes it’s both. Professor Mike Pearson, described y filltir sgwâr as the experience that ‘at the age of eight we know a patch of ground in a detail we will never know anywhere again. In Welsh it is called “y filltir sgwâr” – the square mile – and it exists in the Welsh psyche as one of a series of cognitive maps around home and locale’. The Welsh concept of y filltir sgwâr can be a practice of revisiting, repairing, renewing and restoring. We can lean into what is hidden, and what we will need to hold onto to cherish, preserve and survive alongside.

Grace Quantock is an award-winning psychotherapeutic counsellor, speaker and author of Living Well With Chronic Illness (Orion Spring, 2024), writing from the Welsh valleys where she explores the intersection of illness, presence and place. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent and The Times of London, and she speaks internationally on complex trauma, access and social change.

Share

local

Brit. colloq a local public house

US a local branch of a trade union e.g. Local 118 (Ironworkers)

The Concise Oxford Dictionary

‘England and America are two countries divided by a common language,’ quipped George Bernard Shaw. Little surprise then that I didn’t know the Brit. colloq meaning of the term ‘local’ when in 1964, at the tender age of 17, I first arrived in south Wales to attend the international sixth form at Atlantic College. Little surprise either that I had scarcely any awareness of the local bars in my hometown of St. Paul, capital city of Minnesota. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to cross their thresholds anyway, not until I was 21, the legal drinking age in the USA.

But as I settled into life at Atlantic College, and began to explore the nearby communities, it didn’t take me long to become aware of ‘the local’ in the British sense. Even as sixth formers, we had one.

Llantwit Major was just under two miles from the college – an easy walk and an even easier hitchhike when just about any driver would stop and pick you up if they saw you wearing a college scarf. Our local there was The Globe – and the landlady, clever and sympathetic as she must have been, had put aside a small ‘lounge’ for our use: lounge as opposed to ‘public bar’, ‘smoke room’, ‘snug’, ‘jug and bottle’ – each designating different rooms in a way that is unknown in American bars.

The lounge was reserved for us chiefly because it had an old console hi-fi and we could play our records on it – 45s or LPs. Listening to the music of the times – Beatles, Kinks, Animals – was our chief pleasure, along with conversation more than drinking. Many of us were underage anyway, so getting served shandies and soft drinks under the landlady’s benign and watchful eye was just fine by us. Never was an ID card or passport asked for. A far cry from American bars where even going you would immediately arouse suspicion, a demand for ID, a refusal to be served and an invitation to leave and not come back. For those of us who did drink, Hancock’s bitter and mild was on handpump at 1s 3d a pint. Warm and practically undrinkable to my immature, adolescent palate, keg beers like Hancock’s Barley Bright and Ski lager, cold and always predictable in taste, had more appeal.

The public bar was the preserve of the local patrons and we seldom went in there, except to buy a drink before going back to our designated lounge. Walking past the window of The Globe one day before the Christmas holidays I peered in to see two gentlemen having a pre-Christmas drink. They were singing and swaying back and forth on the wooden settle next to the bar, oblivious to the fact that they had regurgitated a large quantity of their Hancock’s bitter over their jackets, shirts and trousers and on to the floor. The landlady didn’t seem too bothered either! Needless to say I didn’t feel inclined to stop in for a pint.

Nonetheless, the idea of ‘the local’ had entered my head and would always remain: a place where, even as a teenager, I could feel comfortable, listen to music, chat with my friends, even get to know ‘the locals’ over a drink. The one drawback was that there were hardly any girls. Females in Welsh pubs were a rare commodity back in 1965.

After A levels in 1966 and leaving Wales, it was back to a pub-free existence as a student in my American homeland. I spent four years at the University of Minnesota doing a French degree, and, significantly, worked outside of classes for the Minnesota Daily as a student photographer. As for refreshment and socialising after my academic labours, the phenomenon of the coffee house on and around the campus was one way of quenching the thirst of under-21s such as myself. It had been so since the Beat days of the 1950s.

A nineteen-year old Bob Dylan discovered this when he enrolled at the same university in 1959 and began to frequent the Ten O’Clock Scholar at 14^th Ave at 4^th St SE in Dinkytown, the Minneapolis equivalent of Greenwich Village. Live music and the folk revival were positively up his street as he became a fan and learned the licks of established folkies such as ‘Spider John’ Koerner, leaving his academic courses second fiddle.

By the time I arrived at the university in 1967, established venues such as the Scholar had moved from Dinkytown to the bohemian quarter and epicentre of the Minneapolis 1960s counterculture, the Cedar Riverside area of the West Bank (of the Mississippi River). A Daily assignment took me both to the Scholar and the Free Store, which had not long before been a bar – the Little Inn. Two ‘locals’ there had stopped in to shelter from the Minnesota winter and get a free coffee. Along the same street, Cedar Avenue, the bars came alive at night: sizeable, open room affairs, tap beers (no real ale that’s for sure) and live music or jukebox. Right on.

Years later, photographing the features of hometown taverns, I would find that the usual watering hole was pretty devoid of distinctive architectural features: big plastic signs advertised beer, food, pool table, pull tabs, with the sign maker’s skill limited to the most basic illustration on a lightbox meant to shine at night. Food could be interesting though. The ‘booya’ at Billy’s Victorian Bar in St. Paul is a meat stew, originally brought over to the northwestern Wisconsin by Walloon Belgians and popular in the Midwest. And so my visits to bars once I turned 21 were the usual student haunts around the university campus – but none were quite like my experience of The Globe back in far off Llantwit Major in Wales.

Graduating with a French degree, a passion for photography – with some experience of photojournalism – and coming to the end of a two-year stint working in a local hospital in 1973, I had no career prospects; not until I discovered that teaching jobs for language graduates in the UK were in much greater supply than in Minnesota. Successfully applying for a place at University College Cardiff to do a PGCE, no longer would Wales be a distant memory.

I packed my bags and headed back to Cymru in early 1974. Accommodation was with a friend from my Atlantic College days, still a student himself. Nearby were other classmates of his and, not surprisingly they had a local: the Claude Hotel in Albany Road, Cardiff. Suddenly it was like being back in the 1960s and the Globe in Llantwit Major. A friendly, mumsy barmaid: ‘Alright lovely boy, what can I get you? A pint of Whoosh? There you are my darling, that will be 16 pence please.’ A comfortable, stylish oak-panelled lounge, lively public bar, a convivial community gathering place, even an off-licence to buy a flagon to take home after shut tap at 10.30.

Share Cwlwm

I wasted no time photographically exploring Cardiff, the newfound city – much less affluent, in decline certainly, but with an architectural character lacking back home in St. Paul. In 1970s Cardiff, the area around the Hayes and Mill Lane was a magnet: a jumble of streets with antiquarian book dealers, a dart shop, leather goods, a jazz club, a delicatessen, an open-air market. There were no shortage of fine exteriors: the Salutation’s symmetrical row of black and white Romanesque arches; the green and gold enamelled-tiled facades of the Golden Cross and the Vulcan (now reconstructed at the Museum of Welsh Life at St. Fagan’s), the Glastonbury Arms aka the White House, with its white tiles from top to bottom. All with leaded glass windows incorporating the Brains blue and white mosaic motif. Patrons and licensees didn’t mind being photographed: the landlady of the Salutation, two lady patrons in their 1970s finery in the Golden Cross.

And what of Tiger Bay? Would I find it to be the reputed notoriously dangerous place, full of dodgy pubs and clientele? Not at all. Butetown, its featureless new-builds dominated by two tower blocks, was already showing wear and tear – a decade on from having had its Victorian terraced streets unceremoniously replaced. Two modern estate pubs, the Bosun and the Paddle Steamer, failed to arouse my curiosity. But as you crossed the bridge over the disused Junction Canal and took a few steps down to the former towpath, a unique piece of the sign painter’s art advertising Brains Honest Ale had managed to survive.

In the Docks residential area, a ghost-town of boarded up streets, there were still a few signs of life on as they awaited the same fate as Tiger Bay. In George Street The Cardiff Castle still had BRAINS worked into the brickwork of its gables. In Louisa Street, at the North and South, where boxer Jim Driscoll used to train in the ‘blood kitchen’ cellar, the beer engines and bar fixings were being taken away just as I arrived, but a lovely ‘Jug and Bottle’ stained glass sign hadn’t yet gone. In Harrowby Street, the New Sea Lock, where I had my stag night in 1981, Danny Whelan continued to serve the locals until the building of the Butetown Tunnel caused it to subside, resulting in its demolition.

Although a foreigner, I too could feel a sense of loss, a despondency when committing to film those last pubs in local streets now only to remain in photographs.

My first teaching post brought me to Newport in 1976, but I didn’t turn my photographic attention to the town until well into the eighties, when marriage and children meant that my camera was most often pointed at family.

In 1995 that changed radically when author, teacher, Newport historian and friend Alan Roderick asked me to take photographs for his book The Pubs of Newport, published in 1997. Its scope was extensive, taking in the inner-city areas of Maindee, Baneswell and Pill but then going beyond – to the suburbs and housing estates of the town. I first lived in Maindee, where once again, a traditional backstreet pub just up from Maindee Square, the Crown, was a welcoming boozer. You had crib players on a Saturday morning, shove ha’penny board, darts – or you could just sit and talk or read the paper. On Maindee Square, a cluster of pubs served the local clientele: the Royal Albert, the Carpenters, the Globe, the George, all modest to look at – but one pub really stood out among local streets named after English cities: the Hereford Arms.

Newport – having developed and enjoyed the same kind of maritime prosperity not far behind Cardiff in the late 1800s – had roads linking its docks directly to the town centre. Dock Street dates from the 1830s and provided the link between Newport and its first Town Dock, eventually running all the way to High Street. Lower Dock Street is equivalent of Mount Stuart Square in Cardiff, the location of choice for shipping company offices, ships brokers, colliery offices, consular offices, anything to do with Newport’s bustling import and export trade.

Public houses of course were part of the scene, as was Phillips and Sons Dock Street Brewery (1874). Remains of the licensed trade in Lower Dock Street are now limited to the re-lettered frontage of the former Vulcan pub. The Blaina Wharf, opened in 2015 has been sited near the partly restored town dock entrance, a reminder of Newport’s maritime glory days. At Penner Wharf and the entrance to the dock, Phillips & Sons Malthouse remains, as do the former stables in Mellon Street.

It was along the town-to-docks Commercial Street, Commercial Road, Alexandra Road trajectory that I photographed and frequented, in the mid-nineties, many pubs to grace Alan Roderick’s book. Starting at the top of High Street and nearest Newport castle, two pubs both claim to be the oldest in Newport: the Carpenters Arms and Ye Olde Murenger House both date to the fifteenth century. A green plaque on the wall claims that Carpenters was founded for and by carpenters in 1403. A venerable oak beam in the Murenger claims 1438 as a date of origin. Both have important historical links to the Chartist uprising in Newport in 1839 – the Carpenters as a hostelry where a young Chartist messenger from Bradford stayed after unsuccessfully trying to persuade local leader John Frost to delay his march on Newport; the Murenger was owned at one point by Frost.

Commercial Street in the 1990s had its fair share of pubs, most of which have closed since. The Albert, famed for its middle bar and its Bass, the Talisman (originally the Isca Inn, 1872), refurbished in recent years but seemingly closed now, the Welsh Prince (originally the Oddfellows, 1848) and perhaps the most notable of the lot, the Hornblower, originally known as The Exchange. The ‘Blower’ was noted for its bikers’ fraternity; even Hells Angels were known to pay a visit and it wasn’t unusual to see a row of Harley choppers parked outside. The pub was demolished in 2018 and replaced by a block of flats.

Against the tide of pub closures however, the Alexandra – not to be confused with the now defunct Alexandra Inn in Commercial Road – opened in 2021 by a resurgent Rhymney Brewery, and serves a city centre clientele. You might say that it compensates for the lost Lord Raglan, a favourite Bass watering hole, which stood very near the same spot until it was demolished in 1974.

And where Commercial Street ends at Mariners’ Green, at the corner with Kingsway, there still stands one of the most ornate pub buildings in Newport, the King William IV, the ‘King Billy’ (1850). An imposing baroque-ish four-storey triangular building, its decorative facades face both Commercial Street and Kingsway, each level quite distinct from the one above or below, with prominent bays of Portland stone. A stone balustrade and balconies at the top storey crown the whole affair. As with so many other premises it dates from Victorian times and must have impressed many a sea-faring visitor to Newport coming up from the docks. Across the green with its Merchant Navy memorial column resides the more modestly proportioned Golden Hart (1872), identified by a distinctive statuette of a deer in its own niche high above the entrance. When the Ryder Cup was played in Newport in 2010, the main attraction being Tiger Woods, the pub served several beers brewed especially for the occasion.

Where Commercial Street meets Commercial Road at George Street, the Alma, having graced the corner since Victorian days, retains the name and a pub sign but has been converted to a corner shop. From the Battle of Alma in the Crimean War in 1854 to the Napoleonic Wars, just a few yards away across George Street, stands the pub named after the highest ranking officer in the British army to be killed at the battle of Waterloo, General Thomas Picton. Considering he was active in the slave trade and known for his cruelty as governor of Trinidad, I am surprised that the pub sign bearing his portrait still hangs in these days of protest and the removal of such figures.

The Alma and Picton Arms are relatively recent closures, contributing further to the staggeringly large numbers of pubs that have closed along Commercial Road and adjacent streets since the publication of The Pubs of Newport in 1997. Most of the buildings still stand, converted to other uses or derelict awaiting fate: the Castle Hotel; the Welcome Home Inn; the Commercial Inn; the Windsor Castle Hotel; the Falcon Inn; the Mariners Hotel; the Alexandra Inn; the Cambrian Inn; the Kings Arms; the Top of the Range Club (formerly Olive Branch Inn); the Royal Exchange, the Irish Club. In side streets near Commercial Road you would have also found The Dolphin; the White Hart; The Cumberland House; The Tredegar Arms and The West of England.

The most remarkable of all Newport’s pubs is or was the Waterloo Hotel with its imposing clock tower, ornate interior tile work (similar to the Golden Cross in Cardiff) and luxurious interior oak-panelling. A unique frosted glass window lettered Workmens Dining Room indicates that the premises were divided into areas for the working and up-market mercantile classes. In the same vein, The Mountstuart Hotel at the dock gates in Cardiff had its ‘Captains Room’ separate from the public bar. The Waterloo must have offered luxurious surroundings and accommodation to ships captains, owners, agents, colliery proprietors, and business owners connected to the port. Local people too, though they had plenty of choice in the back streets of their neighbourhoods.

Of the numerous pubs that once stood in Pill, only three are still trading: the Ship and Pilot; The Church House (in local lore the birthplace of W.H.Davies); and at no.2 Jeddo St, The Royal Oak.

If ever my connections with a community pub, despite the drastic decline in numbers, had unexpected benefits, it was in Pill, in the Royal Oak in Jeddo Street. I’d never been in after photographing the exterior in 1995 for The Pubs of Newport.

Curious to see what it was like, I walked in one Saturday in early 2017. The place was busy, with lively conversation – raucous at times – without the usual pool table, fruit machine or music dominating the ambience. The lounge was a gathering place for even the occasional family stopping in to get their kids a bottle of pop. But the unusual feature in both the lounge and public bar were paintings by local artist and ex-merchant seaman Bill Coughlan. I asked the landlady Helyn if he frequented the pub and was told that he came in for a pint on a Sunday lunchtime. I mentioned that I was interested in his paintings and would like to chat to him.

The next day, a Sunday, he came in and we had a significant chat during which I mentioned that I was exhibition organiser for Cwtsh Community and Arts Centre and would like to show his work in the gallery. He was reluctant at first but eventually agreed, provided I could find enough of his work which he’d never shown before, except in Pill pubs – the Cambrian, West of England and the Royal Oak. He was in the habit of giving his work away. Paintings were in the houses of friends and family, in Pill, in Cwmbran, other pubs, in fact in other parts of the world where he had painted while at sea ex-merchant seamen friends.

It took several months to contact the owners and get a collection together, but finally, in October 2017, the exhibition ‘All at Sea’ was launched at the Cwtsh. Very sadly, Bill, who had been terminally ill with cancer and refused medical treatment, died four days before the launch.

I’d sent him photographs of the paintings and the gallery, hoping that he would survive long enough to see them, but it was not to be. Needless to say, the gallery was full of his family and friends for the posthumous opening. Bill Coughlan was also known in the community for designing and painting the Royal Oak pub float for Pill Carnival on August Bank Holiday. After he died in 2017 his work was carried on by his niece and I was able to photograph the Disney-themed artwork for the float, the makeup session in the pub on the day of the carnival and the float as it prepared to leave the docks as it joined the carnival procession in Commercial Road.

In the early days of the twentieth century Newport’s three breweries had almost 140 pubs, tied houses, with most of them surviving until the 1960s. Today just 25 that survive, not as tied houses but owned by pub groups, some large such as JD Wetherspoon (Tubby Linton, Tom Toya Lewis, Godfrey Morgan, Queens), some small, such as JW Bassett (Carpenters Arms, Pen and Wig). The building of new housing estates since the end of the second world war and expansion in more modern times, has included either the building of new pubs, especially in the 1960s, or conversion of nearby older buildings.

Since the 1990s several pubs and breweries have opened and some closed. 2012 saw the opening of Newport’s first microbrewery, Tiny Rebel, which has has become so successful that a new, purpose-built brewery and pub in Rogerstone started brewing in 2017, becoming Wales’ biggest. Their first pub opened in Cardiff in 2013 before the Urban Tap arrived next to Newport Market in 2015 where it traded until March 2024. Two micro-pubs located in former shop premises have opened since 2017: the Cellar Door in Clytha Park Road (2017) and the Weird Dad ‘bar and nano brewery’ (2021) in Caerleon Road, opposite the Cenotaph in Clarence Place. In between times, the Little Tap House in Baneswell Road opened in November 2023 but lasted less than a year.

Wetherspoons in particular has ‘saved’ some older iconic buildings and named them after historic figures. Maindee Cinema has become the Godfrey Morgan, the YMCA has become the Tom Toya Lewis, and in Cambrian Road, the first Wethersppons in Wales, named after Newport-born naval hero John Wallace ‘Tubby’ Linton. Many former pub buildings in Newport survive as shops, offices, takeaways, Indian restaurants, even housing for the homeless. The Murenger and LePub host regular poetry reading events. Other twenty-first century pubs, on the outskirts of Newport include the Dragonfly, at Celtic Springs, Coedkernew, the Llanwern Bull at Glan Llyn, on the former Llanwern Steelworks site and the Blaina Wharf at the site of Old Town Dock.

And so it goes. Recently I had an exhibition at Cwtsh entitled Down Your Local? – images of pubs from the 1990s to the present. I was compelled to use a question mark in the title, for as the photographs demonstrate, if you live or have lived in Newport and had a local pub, it may or may not still be there.

But who knows? You may well find another establishment has taken its place or may not be far away. You may well be influenced to move out of your local community to find an establishment that suits you, for the choice of food, entertainment and drink has never been so varied in the city and its suburbs. This is despite the hospitality sector being hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and now the new Labour government being criticised for its small business unfriendly policies, especially the increase in National Insurance levies, increase in the minimum age to employees, raising business costs which pub owners say they cannot afford and will cause further closures.

But even if it can’t be in what you once knew as your local, where the once-familiar call for ‘last orders’ followed ten minutes later by ‘time please’ may not be heard as you sup your pint until midnight, it’s still time I say ‘Cheers’ to all.

Share

John Briggs was born in 1947 in St Paul, Minnesota. He came to Wales in the 1960s to study at Atlantic College in the Vale of Glamorgan, where an increasing passion for photography resulted in his first street images of Cardiff. He gained a degree in French at the University of Minnesota, also working as a part-time reporter. Returning to Wales to do teacher training at University College, Cardiff, he began systematically photographing the city’s disappearing docklands. His books include Before the Deluge, Taken in Time and Newportrait. He has also published Walking Cardiff and Walking the Valleys in collaboration with Peter Finch.

The world-renowned course was founded in 1973 by David Hurn, the recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Journalism award at the Welsh Media Awards that took place at the Parkgate Hotel, Cardiff on November 15.

The course had such a reputation on the national picture desks that when presenting my portfolio to the wonderful Tony McGrath, then Picture Editor at the Observer, he asked where I was from, and I told him Newport, to which McGrath said: ‘Ah you are from mother’.

The Newport course was the supplier of so many photographers to the industry all over the world, me being one of them, and I am honoured to still call David a friend.

It all started for David Hurn in the officer’s mess while still in the army when he picked up a copy of the magazine Picture Post. He still remembers the date: February 12th 1955.

David was overwhelmed by an image on one of its pages. ‘Suddenly I started to cry really quite violently,’ he explains. ‘It was not just little tears, it was big sobbing.’ The image, taken by Henri Cartier Bresson – a photographer David had never heard of at the time – was of a Russian army officer buying his wife a hat in a department store in Moscow. ‘It triggered a memory of my own father returning from World War II and taking me and my mother to Howells department store in Cardiff and buying her a hat. It was the first memory I had of the love between my mother and my father, [and] I instantly realised that all Russians don’t eat their children. This one simple picture I believed, more than the propaganda.’ The seed had been sown and David Hurn decided at once that this is what he wanted to do.

It was as a freelance he gained a reputation for his reportage, covering the 1956 Hungarian revolution – an assignment he took on with camera in one hand and the instruction manual for said camera in the other. A true case of learning on the job and wanting to achieve. David hitchhiked to Hungary then crossed into Budapest in an ambulance, where he was introduced to the Daily Mail correspondent who introduced him to Life magazine.

His images were published in Life, Picture Post, The Observer and more around the world. Life ensured that Hurn left Hungary before Soviet tanks entered the city. He says: ‘Chances happen throughout our lives – but do we always take them? Sometimes we don’t realize that the things in front of us are chances, opportunities, waiting to be seized’.

This was a time when photographers were becoming celebrities, featuring on television and in magazine pages as much as their subjects. People like David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and Hurn were becoming icons of the fashion led 1960s. David was in the mix, associating with the right people in London, and as a young photographer he featured in two Ken Russell films, A House in Bayswater and Watch the Birdie. 

In the early sixties he had a small studio in London, shooting the famous Sean Connery 007 image, gun in hand, for From Russia with Love. But look carefully at that gun. With producer Cubby Broccoli and Connery in the studio the publicist told him they had forgotten to bring the famous Walther PPK weapon. No panic, he told them; he had a Walther, but as a keen target shooter it was an air pistol. David told them to cut the barrel down to size for the poster – but unfortunately they forgot, so tough guy Bond in one of the most famous 007 images is holding an air pistol that wouldn’t kill a moth at 20 paces let alone do a job on Odd Job.

In 1964 he was asked by a friend, Dick Lester, who was about to direct the first Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night to shoot the stills but not for the press. He wanted the images to have a more sociological documentary point of view, to witness the chaos that surrounded the group at the height of their Beatlemania fame. Hurn recalls: ‘During the filming they had the top five slots in the Singles chart and the Fab Four couldn’t go anywhere. Often they were in my car and the police would have to just wave us through a red light because they knew if the car stopped it would be totally mobbed’.

In 1967 he shot the stills for cult sci-fi classic Barbarella, starring leading lady of the swinging sixties Jane Fonda. He became a close friend and held her confidence enough to be asked to photograph the sets of The Dolls House and Spirits of the Dead in the early seventies.

On October 21st, 1966 Hurn was in a car with fellow Magnum photographer Ian Berry when they heard of the tragedy in Aberfan on the radio. Turning the car around immediately, they travelled to the village, among the first photographers to arrive at Pantglas Junior School, as dusk was falling. Hurn recalls ‘miners digging in this crap to try and get their children out.’

Grieving parents did not want a photographer around, but David knew he was performing a job that might prove to have not only historical but legal significance. ‘Nobody can ever say it didn’t happen or that it wasn’t as bad as it was seen to be,’ he says.

Speaking in the House of Commons on Oct 26 1967, after an investigation into the disaster, Arthur Pearson, MP for Pontypridd, talked about how improper management of the site had led to a dangerous situation. Mass shale was piled up on top on the hill overlooking the school. He referenced images from the press of the time showing this: ‘We have too lightly passed over this danger of water. Hitherto, sufficient weight has not been given to the mischief which big rainfalls can create. There have been instances during the past week, and there are photographs which show that the bases of large tips run adjacent to mountain streams which flood and wash away the sides. No attempt has been made to protect any tip by walling against erosion. Will the Minister of Power give attention to it? The photographs have appeared in newspapers for all to see these roaring streams, and no attempt has been made to wall the bases of the tips to protect them against erosion.’ 

David Hurn and Ian Berry took some of the most poignant images of the time and they were used in Parliament as evidence of the disaster and played a small part in helping bring about change and preventing another such tragedy. ‘It’s a really good example of photography absolutely justifying being done,’ says Hurn.

Berry and Hurn received a note from Magnum co-founder Henri Cartier Bresson saying their images from Aberfan were Magnum at its best. Hurn was a Magnum nominee at the time from 1964 but was made a full member in 1967.

Being of Welsh heritage, though born in Redhill in Surrey, David was raised in Cardiff, and his proximity to the story helped him decide to return to Wales from London four years later.

It was around this time Hurn turned away from covering current affairs, preferring to take a more personal approach to his photography and it is his book Wales: Land of My Father, first published in 2000, that truly reflects his documentary style – and records the cultural changes that have swept across Wales since the end of the 1970s.

His gentle style of documenting the world influenced me as a photographer, understanding how to show it as it is. The thought process – not just taking images for today but for a hundred years’ time and beyond; to show the simple things, the hair style, the fashion, the culture; the fraction of a second image capturing the imagination and interest to raise awareness on important issues and educate. In these times of AI the truth is being challenged, but photographers like David Hurn will always be there and his images believed.

Through the Newport years and to this day he has continued to document life in Wales and beyond in his unique style. An example taken from outside Wales is from his time spent around Phoenix, Arizona. Arizona Trips was published in 2017. These trips were also visits to a good friend, the late Professor Bill Jay, who collaborated with David on a very successful textbook. Many consider On Being a Photographer the bible of documentary photography learning.

Share Cwlwm

In 2001 David openly says the most important picture in his lifetime was taken. It was taken where the sun doesn’t shine if you know what I mean, and helped diagnose David with colon cancer. The picture found the problem and saved his life, demonstrating the true power of photography.

It was on my return from Sierra Leone after covering the first free election after twenty years of civil war that I showed David some of the images from the trip. He liked one in particular of celebrations on the top of a car in Freetown, where in the centre of the flag is the word ‘peace’. It was a very poignant image considering the history of the country. He asked if I would like to swap the image for one of his own. Of course, I felt honoured to be asked and agreed: not knowing the history or reasons.

During his long career David had the best idea of swapping images with the greatest photographers from all eras (I am not putting myself in this bracket). From Henri Cartier Bresson to Martin Parr, Don McCullin to Eve Arnold. As Parr himself has said: ‘He has produced a concept that is so deliciously simple I wonder why more people haven’t done it. He has built a collection of photographs by exchanging his own images with those of other photographers’. 

This Swaps collection, including the flying flag from Sierra Leone, has been exhibited at Amgueddfa Cymru in Cardiff and now sits in an archive donated by Hurn to the National Museum of Wales for future generations to enjoy.

Share

In 2016, now in his eighties, David found social media and opened an Instagram account. Using the account to share constructive photography ideas and advice, at last count he had over 80,000 followers. On Instagram is another book of Hurn images, taken from his relatively new association with the social media platform.

With more publications due soon, there are now 14 books and multiple zines, the latest on Swifties (fans of Taylor Swift) on the streets of Cardiff before her concert just a couple of months ago. David’s insatiable curiosity continues to fuel his work today and reinforces something he says regularly: to be a photographer you must have a good pair of shoes.  

With a longstanding international reputation as one of Britain’s leading documentary photographers and now in his nineties, David Hurn continues to live in Tintern in the Wye Valley and to work across Wales.

Way back in the 1970s, David wrote: ‘I believe that in a society in which every individual opinion counts, photography at its best has a unique ability to instruct, to help make alternatives intellectually and emotionally: to spotlight foolishness, to bring people together, to break down barriers of prejudice and ignorance, and show ideas worth pursuing. I have not changed my mind.’ 

On occasion I have helped with lifts, to get to the latest Hurn image for his new landscape book. We always know where we are going and the picture that is required, but once taken and driving back home there is inevitably a further request.

‘Do you think I could be a bore and ask if we could go back a mile? I have just seen something interesting.’ David Hurn will never stop looking, and will always be relevant to Welsh photography – and more importantly to Welsh life and its history.

Glenn Edwards is a photojournalist who has worked on over 100 foreign commissions, more than eighty in nineteen African countries, as well as Chile, Ecuador, India, Albania and Bosnia. He is founder and Director of The Eye International Photography Festival, and a good friend of Cwlwm, for whom he has worked on various projects.  

We were hopelessly lost. Delirious after two days of walking around the Gower coastal path, we had become distracted, overly confident in my knowledge of the area, and lured into a false sense of security by the ever-watchful Worm’s Head, a distant outcrop of rock which we thought was our guide. Instead, it had drawn us away from the safety of the National Trust-approved route, and onto a path which in fact led to the precipice of a cliff, beyond which was a stomach-turning drop into the sea. To understand how we got there, however, we’ll have to choose a different beginning.

Back in September 2018, my friend Dom, a keen walker, suggested we arrange a hike before returning to our last year of university. I, with a keenness to show off the rugged beauty of the Gower around which I had grown up, convinced him to journey down from his native Chesterfield. This also seemed like a good opportunity for me to stake my claim in the ongoing battle for Which Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty Is The Most Outstandingly Beautiful between the Gower and the Pennines. Our relationship, in addition to a mutual love of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, had in large part been forged during impassioned debates about Welsh independence, of which I was a fierce defender and he a relentless devil’s advocate.

Wales and Welshness, to me, a Welsh student living away in an English university, had become central facets of my identity, and I realise now that in some ways the Gower Peninsula served as the most tangible focal point of this identity. My mam’s family hail from Llanmadoc, a tiny village on the northwestern tip of the Gower, and despite myself having grown up in nearby Swansea, much of my childhood was spent there, and much of my imaginative and creative life kindled there. It came to represent to me so much of what I feel about Wales: its sense of myth, its strangeness, its magic are implicit in the very landscape and people who live there. My own Welsh identity and attachment to the physical land of the Gower were, and remain, integral to each other. On some level, then, my bringing Dom to this place was a way of attempting to communicate something about Wales and my relationship to it, perhaps more effectively and coherently than I ever could over pints in the student bar, no matter how impassioned these attempts may have been. 

With all this considered, being stranded at the top of Blackhole Gut, with seemingly no way back or forward, seems to me to be a useful image to convey the conflicts and confusion inherent in constructing identities. To put it another way, my memory of my trip around the Gower with my friend, and the reason it has become such a formative part of my makeup, tells me much about the power of places, landscapes and the environment to allow us to tell stories about ourselves, as well as allowing them to tell stories of their own. Of course, I wasn’t really thinking about any of this at the time; rather, my memories have incubated over the past five years to inform the reflections I’m relaying below.

The first day started off bright and warm. After picking Dom up from Swansea train station, we soon found ourselves walking among the holidaymakers on Caswell Bay, enjoying the last breaths of late summer. The thick smell of gorse, purple and humming in the heat, hit us as we climbed the first of many paths up to the headland. The bramble bushes boasted deep, jealous greens, heavy with blackberries, wild flowers blushing their scents at our shins. The expanse of sea across to Devon faced us as we reached the top, and the din of those on the beach fell away, hushed by the thickets of bramble, gorse and cliff between us. 

The rhythm of boot on stone and grass played a central part in the first hours of walking. You have to get into a rhythm. I was no seasoned walker, but I knew that this rhythm — not only of the feet, legs and arms, but also of speech and conversation — is important in any journey on foot. We were entering our third and final year of university, and there was much to catch up and gossip about. We were anticipating with excitement the prospects of our unknown futures. 

We made good progress through Brandy Cove to the “comfortable, wild” Pwlldu, as Dylan Thomas called it. An apt assessment it is. Pwlldu is tucked away but still easily accessible on foot; it looks Mediterranean in a certain light, the water a shocking blue. Its pebbled beach makes a sound like applause as the spent waves drag themselves over its stony belly, back out to sea. Today, the stones clapped for us alone as we crossed the beach and made for the next peak.

The sea was the first thing that especially impressed Dom; the Pennines, with their sweeping vales and sheer vastness, had a power and a majesty of their own, but the grandeur of the sea and our view of it from the high headlands of Pennard, Southgate and Three Cliffs was enough to shock him into reluctant appreciation. The sea that morning was calm and still, but no matter how still the sea is, there is always a brilliant sense of motion to it, a kind of electrified wriggling, a sideways, cyclical sliding within the stillness, as if a horde of greyed serpents were moving endlessly towards the sand.

But it was when we rounded the tight corner of Oxwich Point that we felt that the sea was beginning to behave playfully with us. A thick covering of trees lined the path here and formed a kind of tunnel overhead. This almost entirely drowned out the sound of the sea and blocked the light above us so that, when there was a gap in the tree line, the sound and sight of crashing tide, which was now much closer than we had remembered it, made it feel like it was hiding from us and leaping out, colluding with the vines and trees, playing peekaboo. 

Coupled with our exhaustion, the wider landscape continued to take on a personality. Not that it was the hardest or longest of walks, but after spending hours relating the natural world around you to the paper diagrams on a map, you become dependent on the accuracy and honesty of the landscape, and any sign, real or otherwise, that it is behaving other than expected, produces a stress and a delirium which can challenge an unseasoned walker like myself, especially one who professed to know the place like the back of his hand. 

We reached Port Eynon at about 7pm, our spirits lifted as we spotted some greasy chip paper from the laps of two people sat on a bench overlooking the bay. We quickened our pace and bought butties overflowing with chips and doused in vinegar. Our chips piled, we sat on a bench overlooking the sea, scouring the map for a place to stay. We hadn’t booked anywhere, but managed to steal a night’s camping near the chippy. My diary closes the final day like this:

It had begun to rain as we settled down in the tent – a thick fog descended and the wind roared. We felt truly and wonderfully alone, sipping whiskey and listening to Bob Dylan with the sea wind and rain roaring at our tent. 

We awoke early to a high and rising tide and even thicker fog. The sea itself, which was only a couple of hundred metres from the campsite, was barely visible. There was an intensity to it, and I remember at the time being reminded of a passage in the Mabinogi, where a mist suddenly descends and every living thing in the world disappears. The characters are left wandering through the mist, believing themselves to be the only creatures alive.

The seagulls also started behaving differently. In Swansea town their ever-present squawking and scavenging made them a constant and annoying presence. But here, whole flocks of them would sweep unheard, disappearing into the mist as wave froth dissipates into the sea, gathering in large colonies on the distant jutting rocks. This is where it first occurred to me that my experience of the Gower was really limited to the roads and the car, far from the wildness of its real, hidden coast. I had never approached anything on foot in this way. 

There are two main roads through the Gower, which splinter at Swansea Common. One heads north towards Llanmorlais, Llanrhidian and Llanmadoc, and the other south towards Port Eynon, Oxwich and Rhossili. Both, but especially the southern road, have high, towering hedges, which obstruct the view of passing scenery. To get to Oxwich, for instance, you have to turn off the road, which slopes through trees past Penrice castle and brings you out onto the dunes, and only then do you see the sea. Dylan Thomas noticed this too. In his story ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us’, about two young boys playing truant and camping out on Worm’s Head, Raymond Price, passing through Swansea Common, says “down there is Oxwich, but you can’t see it”. 

The same is true of Rhossili, Llangennith, Llanmadoc – any of the places along the Gower coast, or at least the places I know well. At most, you gather tantalising glimpses of the sea for some of the drive from Swansea, and then suddenly it is there all before you. It is therefore difficult to get a sense of approaching these places. The transition from the teasing greenery of the winding lanes, to the abrupt beauty of the coast, is startling and powerful.

Subscribe now

But this feeling is entirely reversed by the process of travelling on foot. It is all approach, and a sense of never fully arriving anywhere. Driving by car, confined to the road, it can only ever be two directions, one way in, one way out. On foot, however, the landscape can choose how it reveals itself, and that, by virtue of the shifting tides and changing environment, could be infinite in its variety. I think this explains the magnetic grip that Worm’s Head had on me that day, as we approached it on foot.

The thing is, I had been highly anticipating the first sighting of Worm’s Head. It was the dramatic climax of the trip, the embodiment of what I felt to be Gower’s mythic power. Worm’s Head is an impressive outcrop of rock on the south-western corner of the peninsula, moulded strangely by converging tides over thousands of years to form a shape like an enormous sea serpent. If the Gower is the focal point of my sense of Welshness, then Worm’s Head is the focal point of my fascination with the Gower itself. It is Gower’s pièce de résistance, and somewhere I would take any visiting friend. By car, that is. 

And today, the prospect of seeing the Worm was injected with particular significance by the mist. It was on a similarly misty day that raiding Vikings in the eighth century had thought the huge protruding rock to be a giant sea monster, frozen in defence – or attack. They named it the wurm, the Old Norse word for ‘dragon’ or ‘serpent’. The name stuck. Perhaps it had genuinely terrified them, or perhaps it was more of an observation. Either way, it cuts a distinctive enough shape to have warranted naming at all.

But nothing could have prepared me for the moment I first saw the Worm on that day. No matter how keenly we had anticipated its emergence from the mist, it was already there. My diary documents the experience like this:

I had known it was coming, and I’d expected it any moment, but no amount of foreknowledge could have prepared me for that initial sighting. I knew what it was, but for the first moment I was seeing it for the first time. I was filled with an awful wonder, joy, terror, surprise, all in one exclamatory moment. And then we pointed and yelled and cheered with a strange chaotic triumph, “as if we both were blind” as Dylan Thomas said of it, or something similar.

However, this process kept repeating itself each time we followed the path inland and back out again. “We walked on with Worm’s Head always in sight”, my diary reads, but actually it would have been dipping in and out of sight, only seeming as if it was always within our sight, because it felt like it was always watching us. Each journey inland was then accompanied by an increasingly steep ascension and decline, so that it took us longer each time to venture in and back out again, our exhaustion deepening.

The Worm seemed to be nearing us at a quicker and quicker rate. Measuring time now involved how far away the Worm looked. Our gaze and sense of direction followed it, and nothing but it. Each time we ventured inland, following the path, we would be itching to get back out in sight of the Worm. It held an allure that consumed our conversations and imaginations. We wanted to be in its gaze as much as we wanted it to be in ours. It enraptured us to the point that we wanted to stay as close to the coast’s edge as possible, as far from the road as we could be. And that is how we ended up stuck on a cliff, looking down into Blackhole Gut – or, as it is otherwise (perhaps even more aptly) known ‘Devil’s Cwm’.

It is at this point that my diary refers to the walking becoming “increasingly difficult and dangerous,” and involved:

Scaling routes along very narrow paths, with barely a foot’s width of gorse separating [us from] large drops, sometimes as much as thirty feet high. The roots below our feet were tangled and torn, easily tripping and falling off the edge.

Scrambling along the fingernails of the coast in this way was thrilling, and the adrenaline of the unexpected danger we were suddenly in carried us through. We chose to disregard the obvious danger we could see with our eyes and feel with our feet, and carry on, trusting the Worm, trusting the National Trust path, which, it later turned out, we had long since departed from:

We later realised that we’d left the National Trust path for some miles, and were following an unmapped and unregulated route. On the side of a fairly sheer cliff face we found this, when the ‘path’ we’d followed led straight down into a hundred-foot drop.

This was Blackhole Gut. But, of course, after a few heart-stopping minutes of scrambling up the cliff face, trying not to imagine how easy it would be to slide down onto the bed of jagged rocks and gurgling dark water below us, we found the path easily enough, a few hundred metres inland. The chaos of the coastline was hardly discernible even from that short distance, and although we were grateful to have experienced it, we were relieved to see other walkers and have the crashing fury of the sea dimmed in our ears.

The walk into Rhossili was long. Like Oxwich, the end was in sight for a long while, and so it felt closer than it really was. The inlets, which had been getting steeper and deeper as we headed westward, had now opened up into monstrous gorges and cliffs, which my diary describes as “the violent remains of glaciers, torn from the rock and carved like giants’ kneecaps. 100ft from top to bottom, sheer and green.” In my memory of it there was mist, but my diary notes that the sky had cleared by this point. Mist has a way of clinging on to things, even memory.

After some food at the Worm’s Head Hotel — the intensity of the Worm figure now tamed by the quaint, safe, warm pub, with Dylan Thomas quotes adorning the walls — we carried on, the Worm in our rear view mirror, not forgotten but boring its eyes into the backs of our heads. It was about midday, just passed. We planned our way out: over Rhossili Downs to Sveyn’s Howes, an ancient burial chamber, then into Llangennith and over the next hill into Llanmadoc, where we would spend our next night. The landscape was now broadening, the monstrous gorges and giants’ kneecaps flattened into long plains. It was as if the body of the coastline was stretching out and reclining, tired from being hunched and contorted.

By the time we reached Llangennith, as the Peninsula begins to round northward, we were exhausted again, and stopped off at the churchyard for a break. St Cennydd’s church, which I had passed so many times but never been inside, turned out to be a trove of historical and mythical treasure. My diary describes the “many incredible relics” housed there, including a ninth-century Celtic-style coffin-shaped stone, “thought to be a fragment either of a cross-base or the coffin lid of Cennydd himself,” my diary explains. But the most significant thing we encountered was what we gleaned from the church’s information booklets — simple historical accounts of the church’s founding and the mythical origin story of the real historical figure of St Cennydd — which, slightly unnervingly, closely reflected our own experiences and observations of the previous two days. 

The account was written in the tenth century, and describes the birth of the baby Cennydd, who is born deformed as a result of incestuous relations between the Breton King Dihoc and his own daughter, and placed in a cradle and hidden in the reeds of the River Llwchwr, away from the wrathful King Arthur, who happens to be on his way to Loughour for a big feast. Cennydd travels, Moses-like, into the estuary and washes up on the rocks of Worm’s Head, where he is raised by the seagulls and an angel with a bell-shaped breast. He performs various miracles and is then allegedly cured of his deformity by St David himself in 545 AD, then becoming a hermit and living on nearby Burry Holmes, the pre-Norman remains of a settlement there still present. 

What was especially notable about the account we read, however, was the behaviour of the gulls. This tenth-century chronicler had made similar observations to us, noting how they would watch quietly and how whole flocks would behave as one: in the story, when a childless farmer discovers the infant Cennydd and brings him ashore to care for him himself, the gulls attack his farm, driving his cattle into the sea in vengeance, reclaiming Cennydd as they did so. There was an undeniable grace about them but yes, their silence and way of moving together gave them a sinister aspect.

Sat reading in this quiet church made me wonder about the real Cennydd buried beneath us, and of the lives of the people who noted their observations of the surrounding landscape, who were buried around us. How this community – one that had been ravaged by terrifying Viking raids, various plagues and crop failures and floods, and was living in the shadow of this strange, giant sea-serpent frozen in rock – felt about the place they lived. The act of writing down such a story attests to the incredible imaginative grip that Worm’s Head and this area had on the community that lived there over a thousand years ago. It reflects the Worm’s ability – and indeed, that of landscape in general – to function as a narrative tool that the locals could use to tell the story of their origins. It’s a manifestation of this universal human impulse to draw narratives from our surroundings, so that we may better understand them. 

Perhaps the factors which determine how well we can ‘know’ a place include how or whether we can involve it in the stories we tell about ourselves. And this tenth-century chronicler was doing just that: conjuring his own tale, or at least documenting narratives that had been passed down orally, so that the strangeness of the landscape could feel more familiar, less threatening, less hostile. I can’t also help but wonder what King Arthur made of Loughour.

As I consider writing about this final section of the trip, of the journey down into Llanmadoc and our final night there, I notice I am slightly stumped. Re-entering such genuinely familiar territory, as we descended Llanmadoc Hill into the village, felt like emerging from a dream, and trying to mythologise this would feel dishonest, like trying to keep dying embers alight. I know this place too well to be able to make it appear anything other than what it is.

We camped up in one of my grandad’s fields, overlooking the Llwchwr Estuary; I showed Dom the church I was Christened in, St Madoc’s, and pointed out where my relatives lived, where my mam was born. We drank heartily in the pub which gave her her first job, the Britannia Inn, revelling in the Gower Gold it served. The pub was empty apart from a table of elderly people who had just finished their choir rehearsal. We asked them if they would mind taking a picture of us, and they excitedly handed our phone to a man named Graham, who, it seemed, was especially tech-savvy. Ironically, however, despite Llanmadoc being so familiar to me, the effects of several pints of Gower Gold and an absence of street lights meant that it took several attempts to locate the correct field.

I dreamt of St Cennydd that night, whisked along the river below me, the gulls flying overhead and Viking ships sailing in the distance. We awoke, my head sore and feet blistered, Dom apparently fine. We were to leave the coastal path and head inland, cutting through to Cefn Bryn. My nan would pick us up in Reynoldston, at the King Arthur pub, where we had our final pints of Gower Gold. We ate lunch by Maen Ceti, or Arthur’s Stone, the 4,500 year old neolithic burial chamber on Cefn Bryn. My diary informs me that we spoke of “Irish and Welsh folklore,” “the idea of otherworlds and Annwn”, and “Glyndŵr’s Revolt and Owain Law Goch”, but I don’t remember the contents of those conversations, and, in truth, the magic of the previous days already seemed distant, our experiences already intangible myths of their own. 

We ended the trip with a night out in Swansea, playing pool in the Uplands till the early hours and blasting Bob Dylan on the jukebox. We went our separate ways and flew through our final year of university, and indeed the subsequent five years since, enjoying other adventures along the way – though none quite as unique as this one.

I have never retraced my steps along the Gower coastal path. I moved to London two years ago, and Dom, his appetite for adventure apparently not quenched by our journey around the Gower, now teaches English on the Galapagos Islands. But I have returned to that moment on Blackhole Gut, stranded on the cliff, and indeed many other moments on that trip, countless times since. I sometimes want to return to it physically, but I have the feeling that I would probably never be able to find that exact spot again if I were to try. Like the sea, the land has its ways of telling you that it wields great power over you, and never the other way around. 

As I finish writing this piece, I am making another journey, from London to Swansea. I am just pulling into Port Talbot Parkway. It is winter, 2024, and the furnaces of Port Talbot steelworks recently fanned their final flames. One day, though it seems inconceivable now, the steelworks, which have been a feature of the South Wales landscape for generations, will be gone. It feels a bit like trying to picture the Gower without Worm’s Head. They both have similar ways of watching you as you pass by.

Seeing the hills of the Swansea Valley approaching in the far distance, I realise that I don’t, and can never really, know Wales in the way I thought I did. In the same way, when I was fearing for my life on Blackhole Gut, I was wrong to expect that I could know Gower in the way I was attempting to. Because each time you think you get it, the light changes, the moment’s gone. Life happens and you’re lost again, your perspective shifted, and you have to readjust your eyes. 

Rhys Underdown (he/him) is a 27-year-old bilingual writer and musician from Swansea, now based in London. His writing explores his relationship with Wales and Welshness, particularly through the landscapes and mythologies of the Gower and drawing on the inherent tension of living outside Wales. All images are by the author.

You’re in the wrong place my friend,

you’d better leave.

‘Desolation Row’, Bob Dylan

Arriving in New York is a central conceit not only in American culture, but in the imagination of the world.

Think of all those ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore’, Emma Lazarus’ words at the base of Liberty Enlightening the World.

Think of Israel Zangwill’s original Melting Pot: ‘the roaring and the bubbling… the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow… Jew and Gentile… East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame!’

Think of Walt Whitman’s visions of the crowd in ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, and the poet’s direct address to the future: ‘you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, / and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.’

Think too of Bob Dylan, arriving fresh-faced from an obscure iron-ore town in Minnesota, guitar slung over his shoulder, and in cinema of Vito Corleone as a child, passing through Ellis Island. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere – that’s what they say. Big lights will inspire you. Make you feel brand new. You’ll want to be a part of it, your little town blues melted away. 

And yet when Dylan Thomas turned up here, blazing a trail of poetry and self-destruction through the bars of Greenwich Village and the campuses of Ivy League colleges, Wales’ most famous arrival in the city that never sleeps was entering a death spiral. 

Being a Welsh writer – and what’s more a Welsh writer named Dylan, mostly after Bob, but a little after Thomas too –  it’s impossible, arriving in New York, not to feel foreshadowed. 

The very name of Ellis Island, synonymous with immigration through New York harbour, the Statue of Liberty and the American Dream, derives from Wales. Samuel Ellis, from Wrexham, bought what was then called Oyster Island in 1774, intending to turn it into a spot for picnicking. After his death, his family sold it to the United States Government and it was transformed into the famous immigration station, which processed nearly 12 million people between 1892 and 1924. Today more than 100 million Americans, more than 40 per cent of the country, can trace their roots through an ancestor who arrived via Samuel Ellis’ picnic spot. 

Look up Welsh connections with New York and you’ll find strong stories expressed through place names, especially upstate. There you will find a county called Montgomery, a Bangor, Franklin County – and Cardiff, a tiny hamlet in Onondaga County. In 1795, four large Welsh families settled as dairy farmers in Remsen; by 1848 it was possible for the lexicographer John Russell Bartlett to write that: ‘one may travel for miles [across Oneida County] and hear nothing but the Welsh language’.

And given the importance of built heritage to New York’s projection of power around the world, it is fascinating to learn that Cardiff-born architect John Belle worked on some of the city’s most famous preservation projects including historically sensitive renovations of Ellis Island’s Main Building and the $400 million redevelopment of the world-famous Grand Central Terminal, which Belle himself called Gateway to a Million Lives. 

There is even a Welsh claim to ownership of one of New York City’s most prized pieces of real estate. Descendants of Robert Edwards, a buccaneer from Pontypridd, claim they own the land on which the Wall Street stock exchange was built. According to an unverifiable story that has nevertheless persisted since 1778, a tract of land in downtown Manhattan now worth $680 billion was leased by Edwards to Trinity Church for just 99 years, and has failed to revert to the family. 

But of all the millions of lives and billions of dollars that have crossed the Atlantic Ocean between Wales and America since we apparently discovered the place more than 300 years before Columbus (when Prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd landed in Mobile Bay, Alabama), the singular story that always rises to the top is best illustrated by a picture of a man from Swansea sitting in a pub. 

Bunny Adler’s photograph of Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Tavern in 1952 forms something of a counterpoint to Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’, painted ten years earlier and reputed to have been based on a diner just seven minutes walk away on Mulry Square, at the other end of West 11th Street.

Hopper’s painting famously captures what the artist himself called ‘the [unconscious] loneliness of a large city’. And while the patrons of the White Horse Tavern in the background of Bunny Adler’s photo are, unlike the four lonely figures in Hopper’s diner, busily engaged in conversation, the poet’s thousand-yard stare firmly suggests the unravelling that infamously ended with the dubious claim to have downed eighteen straight whiskies at this same bar near the end of the following year was underway.

Share Cwlwm

Today the West Village retains only a bougie version of its previous bohemian charm, and although the White Horse Tavern trades heavily on its history, its upmarket ambience, tables heavy-laden with napkins and cutlery, and eye-watering price list ensure there is little succour for a contemporary Welsh writer in New York. Ten dollars plus tax and tip for a solitary pint of Guinness puts paid to any notion of falling out of here in the manner of the pub’s most celebrated patron. If he were alive today I don’t think Dylan would give the place a second look, except to marvel at how it has become a miniature mausoleum to his memory.

On one wall, the poet stares down from a large print of Bunny Adler’s photo, positioned so that you can see through an adjacent doorway the exact spot where it was taken; opposite, a large mirror is etched with the text of ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, the world’s most famous villanelle, published the year before the photo was taken. Around the rest of the dining room are framed further pieces of Dylan memorabilia, including the cover of a first edition of Dylan Thomas’ New York by Tryntje Van Ness Seymour, a book that documents ‘the last haunts of the Welsh poet… preserved in mood-evoking photographs’. Its blurb says that Dylan came to New York three times and that ‘Twice he left alive. Finding Greenwich Village to his taste, he made it his habitat, and in a short time became one of its more celebrated denizens.’ There is pathos in the following line: ‘What his life would have been like if he had never found New York and the Village we cannot know.’

The streets of New York have long had a hold on my imagination. I am hardly alone in this, such is the global cultural power exerted by the ‘Big Apple’. Indeed, there can be few people on the planet for whom the two monosyllables of the city’s name do not conjure visions of gleaming towers and great glass elevators, as well as grime, graffiti and steaming grilles. 

First, it was four bright green ninja turtles who crawled out of the sewer and into my boyhood dreams. Then as a younger teenager it was Michael Keaton’s Batman. Later I was transfixed by Robert De Niro’s mission to clean the scum off the streets in Taxi Driver. What these disparate visions of New York had in common was their depiction of the city as a place of vice and crime, where evil lurked under every manhole cover, behind every neon restaurant sign and in the shady foyer of every seedy cinema. It was a city of comic book villains, bullies, pimps, thieves, and gangs of ninjas; a nocturnal dystopia populated by real-life lowlives and made-up mutant goons.

Share

Perhaps the particular appeal of this New York in my youthful imagination – whether as a ten-year-old Turtles-head, a teenage Batman fan or a sixth-former discovering Scorsese – was because it could not have been more different from the only place I knew. A tiny hamlet in the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, overlooked by both the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains, could not be any further from the mean streets haunted by the Joker, Travis Bickle, and the Evil Shredder.  

The closest we got was a single alleyway in the nearby town of Brecon that – if only for me – contained ‘the streets of New York’ aesthetic I had begun to romanticise. Between the old town library and a pub called the Punchbowl, L-shaped Bell Lane consisted of loading bays, fire escapes, basements and backdoors, manhole covers, gutters and grilles. There was even a pizza and burger joint, now called Little Italy, that opened late, bathing the alley in ethereal light.

Between the fabled towers that stretch into the sky like something from science fiction and their comic book counterpoint underground is a real city with a deep and meaningful history. But so thick are the layers of myth-making, in movies and songs that make us all feel like we know the place before we get there, that it’s nigh on impossible to separate fact from fiction.

Paul Theroux’s classic essay ‘Subterranean Gothic’ (Granta, 1982) explored the city’s Rapid Transport System in the days when citizens and visitors alike feared to ‘go into the dark’. Although Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans, which finds its loudest echo in the title of Bob Dylan’s song, was set in San Francisco, it too had its genesis in Greenwich Village, rooted in the author’s brief romantic relationship with Alene Lee, an African-American woman who typed manuscripts for both Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. When Dylan stands on the pavement thinking about the government in the opening lines of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, it’s hard to imagine that sidewalk being anywhere else.

In the mid-1960s, Dylan’s lyrics were often infused with the influence of the Beats. Dylan himself said later: ‘I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, bebop crowd, it was all pretty much connected. It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti… I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic.’

The titles, and to some extent the lyrics of some of Dylan’s greatest songs arise from this period, when the singer-songwriter lived at the Chelsea Hotel, where his Welsh namesake and inspiration had stayed just twelve years earlier, right up until the time of his death. ‘Visions of Johanna’ (1965) drew on Kerouac’s Visions of Gerard (1963) and ‘Desolation Row’ on Desolation Angels (both 1965). Both songs are suffused with sometimes surreal and often ethereal imagery that is nevertheless absolutely rooted in the New York of the period. In Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s, Mike Marqusee calls ‘Johanna’ a ‘flickering, electric, ghostly cityscape’; the narrator’s heat-pipe dream takes him through lofts, a museum, empty lots and out on the D-train, where snippets of overheard conversation become like Edward Hopper’s domestic scenes glimpsed through windows.

Another Welsh writer who captured New York in its mid-century pomp, albeit from a very different vantage point, was Jan Morris. Manhattan ‘45 is a slim volume that zeroes in on the period at the end of the second world war. It was the year New York City and the island at its heart definitively emerged as custodian of a global dream of better. Hiroshima and the Holocaust had changed the world forever, and it was America’s heady mix of ambition and armoury, idealism and ideology, cocktails and capitalism that led the world, for good and for ill, into the new post-war order.

Morris wrote Manhattan ‘45 in 1987, reimagining and reconstructing the city as it had been four decades earlier. Now another four decades have elapsed and along the East River, 193 flags continue to proclaim this idea: New York City as capital of the world. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of Manhattan, near its southern tip at West Street, the One World Trade Center announces itself as the world’s financial hub. And all over the five boroughs’ urban sprawl – from Harlem to Greenwich Village and from Tin Pan Alley to BedStuy, Brooklyn, the streets express their own hold on the subcultures of the world. Jazz, disco and Hip Hop all had their genesis here, along with Beat poetry, abstract expressionist painting, salsa, breakdance and tap.

At street corner souvenir stands, Trump and Kamala hats sit side by side in non-partisan stacks; the hustlers don’t give a damn about your politics as long as you are parting with your dollars. New York Mets baseball caps and I ♡ NY t-shirts have become ubiquitous not just here but around the world, expressing a global acquiescence to an American dream and an empire state of mind. Your local place is your local place, but New York, somehow, belongs to us all.

For all of human history we have been drawn to the watering hole. The village green, the town square; the park, the pub, the beach. The NYC megalopolis is simply the Grand Central Terminus of civilisation, the world’s watering hole, the village green for the Global Village, the town square for a barely united nations. Its Times Square is the biggest and the brightest. Its Park is Central. But often it is only the scale of the city that sets it apart. It is a surprise that Manhattan hasn’t sunk into the Hudson river under the weight of the world’s expectations.

Every arrival at Ellis Island – or LaGuardia, or JFK International – comes with their own baggage, their own idea of how the city will help them to ‘make it’. We come escaping pogroms and poverty, or simply the boredom of small town, small country lives. We step off planes and platforms believing this is it; everything is here, everywhere we look, within a few short blocks.

The Empire State Building! The Chrysler! The Flatiron! Macy’s! Tiffany’s! Bloomingdale’s! Madison Square Garden! Trump Tower! Brooklyn Bridge! The Statue of Liberty! MOMA! The Guggenheim! One World Trade Center! Wall Street! Broadway! Fifth Avenue! Sixth Avenue! The United Nations! The Apollo! Radio City Music Hall! Carnegie Hall! Union Square! Washington Square! Cafe Wha?

But once your head stops spinning and you approach the bar at the White Horse Tavern, here you sense, truly, what it is to be a Welshman in New York. A ten dollar Guinness tastes only of loneliness, and the mirror on the wall reminds you only that ‘Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight… learn, too late, they grieved it on its way’.

These words from Wales only serve to remind you of every one of the 3,300 miles you have travelled from the places where you really belong.

Subscribe now

Places are, after all, just places, imbued with meaning only through experiences we have in them. In these sites of secular pilgrimage, the disappointment can be crushing. So give me the Hayes over Times Square, Roath Park over Central Park, Cardiff Central over Grand Central, Clwb Ifor Bach over CBGB, Barry Island over Coney Island. Pub of my namesake, my namesake can keep it.

Maybe Dylan felt that way too. The White Horse was a haven not a destination, the poet’s sanctuary from the big city. Its long curved wooden bar and the bottles stashed behind were a one-way runway, an attempt at escape from himself. It was a home from home for a poet who was – despite his talent and no shortage of people seeking to celebrate and indulge it – lonely, depressed, physically ill and adrift in a foreign land. Outside was an alien cityscape of skyscrapers, life on a scale unknown in London, let alone in Wales; inside, here was Brown’s in Laugharne again, a comfort zone of loosened tongues, loose women and a loss of inhibition and control.

Share

New York was and is a study in how we gather, how we move, how we dream big or go home, or dream big and get washed up elsewhere. It is the world screwed up into a ball. For some, it’s the bravest experiment humanity has ever known, the ultimate melting pot, its skyscrapers physical and metaphorical pinnacles of human achievement. Its Babel-towers cannot help but evoke feelings of hope and wonder.

For others, it’s where dreams go to die. What was Dylan looking for at the bottom of his glass? If he’d come back to the Village just twelve years later, he would have heard the voice of a man with whom the two of us share a name, the advice he probably needed to hear buried in the middle of a song about the city’s seedier side: You’re in the wrong place my friend, you’d better leave.

Dylan Moore is co-editor of Cwlwm.

Nik, Jude and I were gazing at yet another abandoned church in Llanelli. The wind was strong enough to knock our balance, our coats not as waterproof as we had so confidently thought. Jude, a lecturer in photography and Nik’s assistant for the day, clutched the handle of a flimsy umbrella. The wrought-iron railings of the church had, in my memory, always been in the process of shedding their paint. The overgrown grass, a rippling wave in the wind.

There has been more talk of churches today than I thought there would be. The church at the end of my street, where I once took jiu-jitsu lessons in the basement, has since been bought and turned into a home by some photographer from London. Then there’s the church opposite the post office on Ann Street that’s been desolate for over a decade. We count four churches on Church Street – more a cemetery than bustling social space. All of them were closed, either permanently or just today. It’s hard to tell. Sometimes it feels as if dilapidation doesn’t happen gradually, but overnight, or right in front of your eyes.

The back of the Presbyterian Church on the corner of Cowell Street and Stepney Street is opposite the job centre, where the titular character of my story ‘Tommy’ attends AA meetings. The back door of the church, a steel cross on black paint is partially covered by scaffolding. The red brick façade of the YMCA next door remains, while the interior (at the time of writing) was in the process of being gutted, sealed off by a steel fence, ready to become a block of flats.

‘It seems like the only business doing well in Llanelli is the supplier of steel fences’, Nik says. It’s true; the town is covered in demolition sites: the YMCA, the Altalia building, the old Theatre Elli, which I can’t look at without being confronted by childhood memories. I think the last time I sat within its creaking stalls was a screening of Grease when I was in secondary school. Maybe Year 9 or Year 10. I didn’t sing along to a single word when everyone else did, rising out of their seats for every song. I remember feeling particularly sensitive to the perfumed chokehold of the middle-aged Pink Ladies. The Grade-II listed building, its frontage the colour of a cigarette packet, has been pockmarked with fences and scaffolding for over a decade. In the park where St Elli’s Church is situated, we even see a Christmas tree sealed in by steel fence, as if the very idea of Christmas is awaiting demolition. 

I took Nik across swamping fields to look at goalposts chalked onto a brick wall, towards the town end of Station Road, while Jude continued to wrestle with the umbrella under a hunchbacked tree. I told him how these apartment blocks never really had better days, that the population housed within are best avoided; they’re mostly drug-pushers and takers. People as potholed as a Llanelli road. I found myself parroting my parents’ opinions – opinions shared by the wider community. I felt faintly disgusted after this realisation, like I’d witnessed my reflection in the wind-blown mud water of the field we’d just traipsed across. I didn’t know what I truly thought.

The self-convinced parental wisdom, twinned with assured Wales Online articles, fought to dampen any resistance I may have had to the idea that these residential flats are occupied by something more sinister than people just trying to survive. This isn’t a notion I give voice to in my parents’ presence. They think of me as sensitive, that I want to see the good in people. Mostly, they’re right. I want to think of people beyond their given labels, to consider the texture of their lives other than ‘criminal’, or ‘druggie’. I want to consider empathy.

Share

Further along Station Road, Nik remarked how the Home Bargains shop was busier than the high street. A busy, puddled car park contained by a low wall gives the shop an appearance of a private island, a consumerist mecca. The shopping trolleys, caged within each other like a metal Matryoshka Doll, made me depressed. Across the street is the firework shop whose proprietor was the inspiration for Jimmy Pugh, the protagonist of another of my stories, ‘Opportunity Street’. A drinker, womaniser, local con-man — hopefully not much of a reader. The shop, like everything else on this dreary day in the first week of the year, was closed. Rainwater slithered down the profanities graffitied over the steel shutters. Nothing so far had inspired us.

It was Jude’s suggestion that we take pictures against the red metal shutters of a Chinese takeaway. Llanelli Packed Meals – my family’s go-to weekend treat, food whose colour is a diverse range of browns, fried with enough oil to power a mid-sized car. I held the umbrella as Jude helped Nik with his flashgun and light levels. While Jude pondered dog bones in the pungent warmth of a pet shop, Nik and I must have spent a soaked half-hour attempting to get a good shot. Waiting for the road to be cleared of cars between takes dragged out the impromptu shoot. Nik requested that I stride across the road and past the shutters like I had nowhere to walk to and I was pissed off about it. Easy enough. I’d been doing it all day, taking a battering from the wind and cold. I jammed my hands deep into the pockets of my oversized coat, hunched my shoulders as a shield against the rain, the landscape. 

The picture came out better than I could have hoped for. I fell in love with it – which was a welcome surprise, as I generally do not like pictures of myself – ironic, as this photograph only shows the back of me. I don’t mind so much when I’m taking the picture, as I am more in control of the perception of me.

I consider this photograph by Nik a portrait. The hunching of the shoulders, the ears and back of neck the only flesh exposed, the slight shadow closely hugging the body. In this picture I am presented as both part of the landscape and moving away from it. Seemingly haunted by what I am, or what I am attempting to move away from. Unsure of where I am headed, and yet. Stillness.

Subscribe now

This photograph was very nearly used as the front cover image for Local Fires. I imagined it cropped so that most of my body would be within the French fold of the cover, with the left side of my body – the foot in motion, the length of my arm and shadow – on the front, appearing as if I am away, or into the book itself. I liked to think of the stories as landscape and I, as well as the reader, flaneurs through its pages. I imagined the left half of the photograph stretching across the back of the cover too, the red and scratchiness of the steel shutters providing texture to sit behind the title texts and blurb.

This photograph wasn’t chosen as the cover image for Local Fires because the publisher wasn’t convinced by its muted colours. They also weren’t sure what the photograph says about the collection as a whole. Well, what does it say? I’m not sure.

I can only say what the image, and the collection, say about me. It might be considered healthy to separate these things from myself. To maintain a distance between myself, the work, and the version of myself contained within the work. But how to strike the right distance between myself and various versions of myself within ‘the work’, and how both of these are perceived by an audience? 

That day in January had not been successful. In the lead up to it I had hoped for a bleary but dry day. I would wander the streets with photographer in tow, sharing tales and memories of the town and my place within them. There were no thoughts for eighty-miles-an-hour winds and abysmal rain. After many email exchanges and design mock-ups, the image above was decided on for the cover, this taken by Nik on a second trip to Llanelli, alone and without near-apocalyptic weather. I think the photographer preferred to work without me insisting on nattering away about empty retail units and unimportant childhood memories. 

On our walk together, Nik had been keen to gain entry into the Con Club – the Llanelli Conservative Club – for a look around. Like everything else, like every pub where we tested the doors, it was closed. A blackness behind the almost-impenetrable frosted windows.

‘What’s there to do here if both the pubs and the churches are closed?’ Nik asked. I wasn’t sure whether he was being facetious or genuine – it was a valid question. I didn’t have an answer either way.

My dad was able to help him gain entry – a colleague at his workplace was a key-holder. Not for any reason, he wasn’t involved with the running of the club, he just drank there a lot. Most of the batch of photographs that Nik took that second day were of the Con Club’s interiors. It was quite a surprise to receive these pictures, as I have never been inside. 

I had heard stories about the Con Club from my dad, of the clientele – most of whom had spent so many days sitting still in their chairs, they’d be covered in a light coating of dust – everywhere except their drinking arm. The voyeur in me was deeply curious to study these images, while I also aware of the shattering of myth. The red bricks and the heavy brown door represented a containment – not that of a zoo, or a prison, but something other. See also: rugby clubs. The pantry shelves of a kitchen at a local caravan park spring to mind– dusty tin cans missed by the prepper’s swipe before the end of the world. This building and what it symbolised – toxic masculinity, the stagnation of ex-industrial towns, the bunker mentality of the drinker generation, exposed within Nik’s images.

The more I look at this photograph, the more questions I have. Who did the medals in the frames belong to? Who is the ghostly portrait of, and who drew it? Why does the solider to the left of Queen Elizabeth have such an enormous head for his body? I don’t want the answers. I don’t want the mystery dispelled. Knowing would bring me closer to the subject, when I am comfortable in my position as a voyeur. I am content to gaze, almost lovingly, at the crooked positioning of the frames, the scratched and bubbling wallpaper. I try to envision the owner of the jacket strewn across the sofa – maybe he’s just out of frame, popped to the loo real quick. I imagine the drinkers among the debris, with flat pints on mouldy coasters, alone on sofa seats, not bothering to turn over the chairs. Just clear a small circle of dust off the table for their drink. I bet this place has its fair share of ghosts.

One of the biggest surprises I felt upon receiving the photographs from Nik was that the Con Club has a stage. Porthcawl, a 40-50 minute drive from Llanelli on the M4, has the world’s biggest Elvis festival outside of Graceland, attracting over 30,000 people every year, apparently. You just know some of South Wales’ finest Elvis-impersonators have performed on the stage at the Con Club. I bet they have nostalgia on tap here, right next to the bitter. The jagged lines and white lines remind me of Elvis glamour, so plastically replicated in Amazon-bought costumes.

It’s undoubtedly a sad scene – pathetic too, like a caged bird finally allowed freedom, only to fly straight into a window. My eye is drawn to the grey bucket by the stairs to the stage, and without a mop. I consider its function. Is it in use for a bin? Ready to serve as a sick bowl when the ghostly inhabitants have had too many pints of dusty nostalgia? The sad excuse for a DJ station – tables that look like they’ve been looted from a skip outside a school, another closed under the Conservative government’s budget cuts, and that laughable sound system. The stack of CDs, mess of wires, the fan with its face against the wall – one solitary disposable facemask hanging down the back of the table. 

How much of all this detail did Nik see before he took the photograph – how long did he work to get the angle right? My understanding of Nik is that he is a silent observer. A hunter, looking and listening out for the animal of his interest. His images pull the viewer’s eyes in unnatural directions, from one object to the next. Often I find myself reaching a feeling of passive anxiety – safe in my bedroom while gazing at the images on my laptop or phone, my eyes darting from, in this case, the bin to curtains to tables and stacked amps. I am not at ease. I would like to know how Nik felt, stalking the Con Club for images, and how he felt when viewing this scene.

The quietest photo of the series is perhaps the most sorrowful —two chairs and a table, a wheelchair facing the window, all unoccupied. The window is without a view, only a suggestion of shape and colour through the glaze. The scene is contained within itself, tense with static. Who would drink here, in some forgotten corner of the Con Club? It has the same sense of liminality as does a fire escape route, the backrooms of a shopping centre, but simultaneously it feels lived in – the corners of the flyer on the corkboard curling inwards, the chairs facing each other as if their occupants have only popped to the bar, might be back any second. 

It’s this tension of the lived-in space, the stark emptiness left behind by the figure in motion, like a ghost on the move, that I feel really captures my desire to write Local Fires. I have a preoccupation with space – how I and others, fictional or otherwise, navigate physical space while simultaneously navigating internal (emotional, mental) space.

I may not be a hunter, like the photographer with his camera, but I sometimes feel like I can see ghosts – how they navigate through time and space. Everyone is a ghost until I touch their skin, every building too. The Con Club is another abandoned church — in the process of abandonment. There’s no real difference between church and pub, abandoned or not. When the dilapidation happened also doesn’t matter, nor the fact that it did. What does matter, is that people were here — and they continue to be.

Share Cwlwm

Joshua Jones (he/him) is a writer and multidisciplinary artist from Llanelli, South Wales, now based in Cardiff. Local Fires was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize 2024. He has written for Cwlwm previously and led a Cwlwm workshop in Llanelli in January 2024.

The first time I visited Cumbria it felt surprisingly familiar, and that has only grown each time I have returned – not because I recognise in it the England I left in 1989 (I grew up in the southeast, where the alien North begins just beyond London), but because I recognise in it the Wales where I have long since been living. 

The North is always another country, even if it’s the same country – in England, in Wales, and further back in time, in Rome. Perhaps that’s why, when I first read Game of Thrones, its threatening old North beyond the Wall rang true to me: it works so well as an evocation of deep cultural memory. There’s always this dualism of the border – ‘civilised’ language and ‘barbaric’ language; ‘civilised’ practice and ‘barbaric’ practice; the familiar holding back the unknown that threatens change. 

At the beginning of the Wall – Hadrian’s Wall – in Bowness on Solway, a finger-post reads ‘Rome 1150 miles’, but when this border area ceased to be the Roman north, it became yr Hen Ogledd – the Old North of Wales. And just in case you’re in any doubt about being in the Old North, there’s the sign for the turning to Rheged a few miles away. Scholars might argue about the true location of this ancient Welsh kingdom, but apparently it’s a petrol station off the A66, part of a cinema, café and gallery complex that opened in 2000. 

The owners of Rheged are not the first to defy scholars and decide where Rheged lies. In 1852, a Captain William Mounsey from Carlisle did the same thing, if somewhat more elliptically. It wasn’t quite the ‘Ivan + Hayley 23’ graffiti that got carved into the wall of the Colosseum in 2023, causing outrage and the threat of a lawsuit, but it wasn’t far off: at Wetheral, above the steps leading down to St Constantine’s cells, you can read Mounsey’s initials, the date, and three lines of Welsh cut into the rock. Above it there’s a heavily eroded six-pointed star. Now weathered and difficult to make out, like the much older Roman graffiti nearby, his graffiti reads: 

Y DEULEN HON NEUS CYNDYFED GWYNT

GWAE HI O’I THYNGED!

HI HEN ELENI GANED!

This englyn from the medieval manuscript Canu Llywarch Hen on a wall in Cumbria seemed bizarre to me, but then it began to make sense. Surely it’s possible to decode in it an identification of Rheged with Cumbria (or Cumberland as it was in 1852): Llywarch Hen was one of the poets and rulers of the Old North, and the graffiti is in a place associated with St Constantine, who was known as the son of Rhydderch Hael; both of these were also rulers of Rheged.

When I first saw Mounsey’s graffiti, I did what most people do, of course: I googled it. That pulled me into a maze in which I still find myself – not so much a Wikipedia rabbit-hole that took me away from my original quest, as a labyrinth that keeps returning me to the beginning. Perhaps that’s appropriate, given Mounsey’s alleged identity as a spy (I have been unable to verify this) and his interest in codes and mazes (this is rather more certain: he wrote an article about turf-cut mazes in Notes and Queries). 

Of the many mentions of Mounsey, usually in the form of blogs, most appear to embellish a brief single-authored Wikipedia article and two interpretation boards – one at a site in Outhgill, up the River Eden from St Constantine’s cells, and the other on the island of Hoy, in Orkney, where Mounsey vandalised another ancient monument. 

The interpretation boards are informative, but the source material behind the information they give about Mounsey continues to elude me – sources that might explain or support certain questionable assertions, such as him having been a spy, or his identity as ‘The Jew of Carlisle’, or the reasons and meanings of his inscribing his work with a putative Star of David. Curiously, there are no speculations about his use of Welsh, and yet his Welsh proficiency turns out to be the one thing, beyond basic biographical information, that I can trust.

Mounsey’s vandalism of the Dwarfie Stane in Orkney is what has brought him most internet fame, because of the monument’s archaeological interest and its folklore and neo-pagan possibilities. He turns up regularly in incidental travel blogs, newspaper articles, works of folklore, and publications on popular and New Age religion and rituals as a Victorian eccentric with a great back-story, much of it imagined. He’d visited Hoy two years before his Welsh carving in Cumbria, and he marked the interior of the Dwarfie Stane with a line of Farsi. The Historic Scotland interpretation board had it translated as ‘I have sat for two nights and have found patience’. In contrast, I have googled for two nights and gone mad, because from here I pursued a reference to an article that does not seem to exist – or, more probably, that does exist, but not where anyone says it is, and not anywhere that I can find it. In Cumbria, I came to a similar halt with another set of assertions without references – a booklet vividly entitled William Mounsey and the “Jew” Stone, A True Story of Mystery and Detection from the Eden Valley of the Lake District by local historian Charlie Emett. I regret now that I never contacted the author at the time: sadly, he died in 2016. Meanwhile the Dutch author of the Wikipedia article, who cites his own publication (another thrilling title: William Mounsey: A British Spy, allegedly published in 2010), has proved equally inaccessible, as has his book. 

References to the vandalism of the Dwarfie Stane often misspell Mounsey’s name as Mouncey, and the misspelling acts as a sort of fluorescent dye that traces the path of source material. I followed it back to the first mention of that elusive 1864 article (where the spy story apparently originates), and was none the wiser. 

Share Cwlwm

Just as intriguing as the ‘facts’ about ‘Mouncey’ the spy are the ‘facts’ about the ‘Jew Stone’ or “Jew” Stone, the monument that Mounsey created and sited at the source of the River Eden (so many inverted commas: they, too, are a kind of fluorescent dye tracing the path of unreliable claims). Allegedly Mounsey made this engraved stone monument in the same year, 1850, as he marked the Dwarfie Stane, and he placed it (or had it placed) on Black Fell Moss, above Mallerstang. But here too the story leads to an absence: a marker on a map that as far as I can tell does not exist, and maybe never did, and a destroyed monument that only exists in replica form.

That replica, created in 1989 and sited in a fenced enclosure in the village of Outhgill, is now nicely lichened and looks appropriately aged. The peeling veneer of its interpretation board is rather less attractively weathered. It tells two stories: one is the story of the original stone carved by Mounsey in 1850, along with a transcription and translation of its Greek and Latin texts; the other is the story of how and why it came to be recreated in 1989. 

Everything in these accounts suggest that the structure was and is called ‘the Jew stone’ because of its six-pointed star. And there is also everything in these accounts to suggest, both in the way the story is told on the information board and in the later booklet, that a great deal of what is claimed about Mounsey is the result of imaginative projection based on assumptions about this use of a six-pointed star. That includes Mounsey wearing a long beard in a Jewish fashion (whatever that might mean); his sympathy with the Jewish people, and the assertion that ‘the inscriptions could only have been done by someone conversant with the Jewish Scriptures’ (needless to say many Christians of the period would have been conversant with Jewish scripture).  

What did Mounsey mean by the star, though – here juxtaposed with a Greek text, and at Wetheral juxtaposed with a Welsh text? The Greek text does not appear to be ‘Jewish scripture’ after all, but instead a composite of the Iliad and Revelation. Far from being sympathetic to Jews, the words ‘when you have acknowledged your duty to the sacred Scriptures you will be raised again to the order from which you are fallen’ read to me more like plain old mid-century Anglican conversionism – which is to say intolerance of Jews as Jews, not sympathy. 

It’s always possible, however, that the six-pointed star had no Jewish meaning to Mounsey in 1850, nor the text, and that the inferences from it – by two enthusiastic men in 1989 and by me in 2024 – create whole narratives about him that are wrong. All of which seems entirely appropriate, given what Mounsey himself appeared to be doing with his graffiti puzzles. 

His graffiti has provoked some rich historical storytelling not unlike his own apparent assertion about the uncertain location of Rheged. But what can be known about him with certainty is just as rich – and that is his relationship to Wales, which I discovered when I came back home from the Old North to Ceredigion. Here, in the Cwrt Mawr archive housed in the National Library, there are several bound volumes and seven letters written by Mounsey, and there are also several letters written about him and the work in these volumes.  

The books are the product of long periods that Mounsey spent in the British Museum transcribing Welsh manuscripts from the medieval period to the eighteenth century. Some of those transcriptions were published in 1859 and 1860 in the journal Y Brython. It must have been laborious work, and it included extensive annotation (one of them also includes many images, some of them bizarre and garishly coloured, which have been pasted in). 

But it is Mounsey’s letters to D. Silvan Evans, the editor of Y Brython, that bring him alive – as do the letters Evans wrote about him. Mounsey’s are energetic, wide-ranging and long – scrawled, with many dashes – some of it personal, some anecdotal, some scholarly. There are vivid and evocative descriptions of his travels, including a return visit to Orkney where he had been ‘boating, fishing, shooting etc in very wet weather; out all day, coming in tired every evening, & with no conveniences to sit down and write and a strong disposition to go to sleep after getting the calls of hunger appeased’. He stayed a month in Orkney, fishing at different lochs, and ‘occasionally sleeping at farmhouses but our principal place was the great loch of Stennis, where we used to catch trout, & lighting a fire to broil them & feast in the open air’. In the end he was ‘obliged to come home on account of a troublesome affair with a Dentist who had made me a set of teeth which did not fit, and caused me such pain that I was required to make a shift to do without them in Orkney. Which I could do, as we were living chiefly on fish. —’. 

From Galway in 1862 he wrote Evans a gossipy letter about John O’Beirne Crowe, the Celtic Professor at Queen’s College, whose knowledge of many languages hints at the kind of broad linguistic aspirations of those involved, like Mounsey himself, in philology. Crowe evidently had a high opinion of his own linguistic abilities, though Mounsey evidently did not have a high opinion of Crowe:

Arabic? Oh, Crowe says he knows Arabic – Turkish? Oh, Crowe has a grammar – Crowe has a Basque grammar – Crowe has some theories about Albanian etc etc etc The truth seems to be that … unluckily having no common sense his knowledge is of no avail – If there had been no such thing as whisky poor Crowe would have stood in a very high position. He will probably now drink himself to death. It is really grievous to think of a little man with so much learning in his head, and such a round face, going to the dogs in this way. 

Mounsey must have spent weeks transcribing the manuscripts that other scholars could then read when they were published in Y Brython. Maybe that reduces him to a sort of human photocopier, which is unfair, because he also annotated his work, informed by what was evidently a deep and wide reading in the scholarly literature of the period. Based on that reading, by 1869 he had amended his view of Rheged’s location, and accepted that it was in Scotland. William Forbes Skene’s The Four Ancient Books of Wales ‘makes some things clear which were dark before’, he wrote to Evans in 1869. He conceded that Skene had:

rightly fixed that slippery place Reged in its real locality. Iolo Morganwg & his party placed it in Gower. Dr Pew removed it to Cumberland, and claimed the giants grave at Penrith as the tomb of Owen Mab Urien — Sir Walter Scott, when residing in Ettrick Forest, used to date his letters from Reged, so it seems he had an affection for Reged, and wished to have it in his own neighbourhood … But, as Skene points out, the mention of Loch Lomond is conclusive….

In a letter earlier that year he had asked Evans to return his books and manuscripts, which he was anxious to have back again, ‘especially the M.SS. books, which cost me great pains and trouble to write — I have often wished much to have them, but put off reclaiming them in order to give you a little longer opportunity to make use of them, but as it is now more than seven years since I saw them, I think I may fairly call them in. —’. When he did not receive a reply, he wrote again:

I am getting extremely anxious to see my books again. I therefore write to ask when you will have finished your extracts from them. If I had thought of it before I might have told you to mark the passages on the margins with pencil, and I could then have transcribed them for you. I have written 347 … pages since my last letter to you, but I suppose you must have nearly copied all by this time —

Evans must have responded to that second request, because on the 1st of May Mounsey wrote: ‘The books and M.S. arrived safe yesterday, but I had a hunt after them, the stupid people at the station having taken them to the house of my cousin Mr P. Mounsey, who being Captain of the Rifle Volunteers, thought at first that the box contained some unexpected present to himself – so he hastily paid the carriage, but before proceeding to open the box his hopes were suddenly chilled on looking again at the direction.’  

Some years later, in 1876, Evans sent Mounsey a copy of his new book about Ieuan Brydydd Hir, in which he acknowledged Mounsey’s contribution. He was warm in his thanks: ‘Nid bychain yw fy rhwymedigaethau i’r Cadben W. H. Mounsey, o Gaerliwelydd, Sais cynnwynol, ond gwr tra chydnabyddus a llenoriaeth Cymru’ [To Captain W. H. Mounsey, of Carlisle, a native Englishman, but a man extremely familiar with Welsh literature, my indebtedness is no small thing]. In reply, Mounsey thanked him for the copy of the book, and told Evans that he meant to visit while walking in Wales. ‘It is 14 years since I left you, short as the time seems,’ he wrote. ‘Indeed I did not then expect to live so long, for the doctor said I must go every autumn to Spain — so I considered myself on a ticket of leave which might be cancelled suddenly any day.’

Subscribe now

Sadly, his ticket of leave was cancelled a year and a half later, on the 3rd of December 1877. It seems Evans did not know about his death for another fourteen years, as the final document in that collection is a black-bordered note from Robert Mounsey, dated the 5th of September 1891: ‘My great uncle Capt. W. H. Mounsey (late of the 4th and 15th Regiments) died at Rockliffe Hall near this city on Monday Dec 3rd 1877 after a weeks illness caused by bursting a blood vessel.’ 

Mounsey, a practising solicitor, did not make a will, and it is not clear to me yet how his manuscript books came back into Evans’s possession. But their connection was evidently a strong one, as in the same archive collection there are also several letters from Evans that mention Mounsey and the value of his transcriptions. The claim, since 1989, that Mounsey dressed and wore his beard like a Jew, which gave rise to him being called ‘the Jew of Carlisle’, looks rather less certain after reading these letters. Mounsey had stayed on the Llŷn peninsula improving his Welsh with Evans from November 1858 until the following spring. His appearance, Evans wrote, was ‘primeval’, as he wore his beard long ‘like a druid’. 

I’m not yet out of the maze that Mounsey’s piece of Welsh graffiti opened up. There is more evidence to explore in the National Library, and there are archives in Cumbria as well. There’s also the original site of the Jew stone on Black Fell Moss to visit, the bleak boggy upland overlooking Mallerstang – and there Welsh raises its head again in the landscape, though this time bald: the mal in Mallerstang appears to be the Welsh moel.

You can tell a good story about those old Welsh Cumbrian (Cumbric) place-names – Mallerstang, Cumrew, Penrith, Rheged – but like any good story, including the stories about Mounsey (including this story about Mounsey), it involves implication by virtue of selection and omission, because, inconveniently, Welsh/Cumbric is not the only language marking the landscape of the Old North. The village of Hoff is my favourite of these (Hoff yw fy hoff), but it might not be Brythonic at all – it may well be the Norse hof. Cumbria is just as peppered with Norse and Anglo-Saxon as Welsh remnants, marking the path of invasions and migrations, including the Celtic one from the continent. The names are a vivid reminder that this island’s humans have all at some point been seen as threatening barbarians, and that even ‘indigenous’ is no absolute origin: it is merely an older arrival from elsewhere. 

Jasmine Donahaye’s latest book is Birdsplaining: A Natural History. She previously wrote for Cwlwm about climate anxiety.

A note on sources/further reading

Cwlwm does not use academic referencing, but given my own frustration with elusive material, it would be a bit rich if I gave no sources. The main source on Mounsey is Charlie Emett, William Mounsey and the “Jew” Stone, A True Story of Mystery and Detection from the Eden Valley of the Lake District (Carlisle: W. R. Mitchell, 1990), and the Cwrt Mawr archive at the National Library in Aberystwyth. The letters I’ve quoted here are in J. H. Davies, Cwrt Mawr, Papers: Letters from the Mounsey family, X1/53 (55), National Library of Wales, and the letters from D. Sylvan Evans (to B. Williams) are in NLW MS 15773B. Mounsey’s article ‘The Walls of Troy’ appears in Notes and Queries, Ser ii, v.115 (March 1858), 211-212 (it was written from D. Sylvan Evans’s home). Evans’s acknowledgment of Mounsey appears in D. Silvan Evans (gol.), Gwaith y Parchedig Evan Evans [Ieuan Brydydd Hir] (Caernarfon: H. Humphreys, 1876), 5.

On the contested location of Rheged see John Koch, Celtic Culture: a Historical Encyclopaedia, Volume 4 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006), 1499. For an image of the Dwarfie Stane interpretation board, see <wildscotlandfsc.wordpress.com/wildlife-and-courses/orkney-2014-17th-24th-may/>; see also Historic Environment Scotland’s page on the Dwarfie Stane <historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/dwarfie-stane/history/>.

The Somali community in the docks is a part of Cardiff’s ‘mosaic’, and is sustained by four hubs which act as its ballasts. Two mosques – the South Wales Islamic Centre and Noor El Islam – provide spiritual anchoring at the geographic tip and tail of the area. The shops along Bute Street offer a range of products from Somali food, to fish and chips and regular groceries. And nestled between the shops, the mosques, and the Dumballs Road industrial estate is Canal Park, home to Cardiff’s two main Somali football teams, the Cardiff Bay Warriors and Tiger Bay FC. 

This intersection between faith, ethnicity, and football illustrates their deep and mutually reinforcing relationship, particularly for diaspora communities. Frank Roy, the Scottish Labour MP, encapsulated the visceral character of that bond when he said: ‘Monday to Friday, my body belongs to the trade union movement. Saturday my heart belongs to Celtic. And Sunday, my soul belongs to the Catholic Church.’ In a similar manner, the Somali community in Cardiff finds its identity tethered to its faith, hybridised culture, and passion for football.

Every weekend, Canal Park turns into an arena in which young men from this part of town make their presence and skill known to the rest of the city – and where the community comes to get behind them. 

At the end of September, I watched the Warriors play a highly anticipated Welsh Cup match against West End AFC, which they won 2-0. At least 60 spectators attended the game, seated both in the stands and around the perimeter of the pitch, cheering every nutmeg, dummy, and tackle as they taunted the challengers. 

Like commerce, work and other big events in Cardiff, football acts as a kind of connective tissue, suturing different parts of the city together. Football being more than just a game is a cliché we often hear, but for the Somali community, whose presence in Wales is scarcely noticed, it offers a rare and valuable chance for visibility. As Eric Hobsbawn once aptly put it: ‘the identity of a nation of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.’ 

Diasporic teams are a familiar story. Some of the greatest teams were built around diaspora communities seeking sporting glory and an avenue to celebrate their distinct identities. Hibernian FC for example was founded in 1875 in Edinburgh by the Catholic Irish diaspora, followed by the world famous Celtic FC in Glasgow twelve years later. As hundreds of thousands of Italians moved to São Paulo at the turn of the twentieth century they established Palmeiras, one of Brazil’s most successful football teams and in 1920 Club Deportivo Palestino emerged to represent Palestinian diaspora in Chile, the largest outside the Arab world.

During the same period Somalis arrived in Britain’s port cities, Cardiff in particular emerged as vital because of the nearby coal mines in the south Wales valleys. Shipping, the lifeblood of the UK’s maritime empire, had undergone a major technological transformation, from relying on sails to steam and coal – and a new pool of labourers was needed for the engine rooms. The community then, referred to as laskars, were still a small group of largely transient workers. 

The roots of Tiger Bay FC and the Warriors are much more modern, having more to do with the second wave of Somali migration in the early 1990s which followed the collapse of Somalia’s military dictatorship and a subsequent civil war in the country. Many Somalis with ties to Cardiff – my family included – moved here then, and so a population large enough to sustain a football team emerged. 

Share

As some of the early figures in Welsh Somali football explained to me, the initial challenges of adjustment were complex for a population made up largely of refugees. The country they had arrived in was cold, with a different language, faith, and customs. Racism was a widespread challenge. Football served as an escape, but also a bridge between these men and the rest of the city. 

The emergence of diasporic teams can be partly seen as a reaction to feelings of dislocation and marginalisation, even a desire to feel part of a community, says Dr Joseph Bradley, an academic who specialises in the sociology of sport at Edinburgh University. ‘Sports have the capacity to help people feel more comfortable and more justified: something akin to not always feeling a need to be on the defensive,’ he told me over the phone.

Cardiff Bay Warriors and Tiger Bay FC are the end result of several iterations of Somali football teams which stopped running and then re-established under new names. The teams initially emerged around a group of young men in the mid-1990s who played five-a-side games in Leisure Leagues and the Lazarou Cardiff Sunday Football League under the name Somali Dragons, an obvious nod to the Welsh flag and the ancestry of the majority of the players. 

They would spend the next few years also playing against other Somali teams from across the UK, but in 2005 they made a splash when they were invited to the better known and more prestigious Canada tournament, where Somali teams from around the world compete. In 2006 and 2007 they reached the final, losing out narrowly. In 2008, they won.

In the mid-2000s the Cardiff Bay Warriors also fielded a team in Wales’ local leagues. But in 2009, Tiger Bay FC was formed in its place, competing in the Premier Division of the Cardiff Combination League. The links between the clubs have historically been fluid and organic, but Tiger Bay FC is now the longest running Somali team to compete in the official Welsh league pyramid. 

Like the Warriors, Tiger Bay bills itself as an institution which is more than just a football club, seeking to serve the community it represents. Mahmoud Jama, its first player-manager, expressed his delight at how the team has become a pillar of the community, now fielding several youth teams. 

Originally established as an exclusively Somali team by the first generation of migrants who settled in Cardiff, it has since been handed over to younger players from the area and now comprises individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds. Mustafa Mohamed, club manager, signalled a shift in its function and ambition in an interview with Wales Online saying: ‘The team is for all young people who are disadvantaged - regardless of their race, nationality and religion. Now we have players from around eight different nations in the men’s team, from Moroccan to Egyptian, Sudanese, Yemenis, and Libyan.’

The Warriors on the other hand, pooled the talent of the community across Cardiff to take on teams outside the city in summer tournaments. They eventually rejoined the official Welsh football structure under the management of Ahmed Noor, a veteran of the local footballing scene, who has big ambitions for the club. 

Noor was a quick and nimble winger in his heyday, who spent more than a decade playing in the Welsh league with Butetown FC, Taffs Wells and the Grange Quins. Throughout those years he also played in football tournaments for the Warriors and eventually joined Tiger Bay. He’s an example of how the football scene here has developed its own leadership pipeline to keep the clubs running. 

Sitting in a café on West Bute Street, he told me that he wanted to share his experience with the team, nurture a new generation, and ensure they had both opportunities and guidance. ‘The footballers in this area are also pretty much untouched territory,’ he says. ‘There is a lot of talent to choose from.’

During our conversation we reflected on the team’s humble beginnings. 

Canal Park was once a weathered patch of grass; it became muddy and puddle-strewn when it rained, the grass would sometimes become overgrown, and the only barrier separating it from the neighbouring industrial estate was a large corrugated black metal fence. Ffion Lewis, a senior reporter at Wales Online, thought about an ‘irony not missed by the players… the protruding spikes of the Principality Stadium can be seen from the pitch - a stark contrast to Tiger Bay FC’s home ground.’ 

However, like the Cardiff skyline now, dominated by cranes and the skeletal structures of the city’s soaring new high-rises, Canal Park has also turned a new face. Today, it features a sleek AstroTurf, a gantry, a small stand for both home and away supporters, floodlights, and a large net to prevent stray balls from entering orbit or landing in the nearby housing area — an issue that, in my recollection, would cause frequent annoyance. 

‘We’ve come a long way,’ Noor laughs. 

A moment of immense pride arrived when the Warriors were invited to Cardiff City Stadium in the summer of 2022, following their victory in the Somali British Champions League, a national football tournament featuring the UK’s top Somali football teams. ‘We had a lap of honour through the stadium, the big screens were showing clips of our games and all the fans were cheering,’ says Noor. 

BBC covered their victory, calling them the ‘comeback kings’ for the way they clawed themselves back into every game despite initially trailing. ‘We’re living up to the name Warriors,’ says Noor. ‘We fight right til the last.’ Both ITV News and S4C’s Sgorio have since featured the club. 

@cardiffbaywarriorsWhen our backs are againsg the wall, we have no choice but to fight🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿⚔️ Youtube video out tomorrow 7pm🎥 #football #somalitiktok #footballtiktok #fyp #ukfootball

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

‘We now get invited to primary schools to speak. I get a lot of messages about people who want to learn about us, and we’ve even got supporters outside Cardiff,’ he says. 

I chatted with several other players who used to play for the team who were proud of how far things had come. ‘There were games when we never had enough players some days,’ said Mohamed Dualeh, a former striker-cum-goalkeeper. Dualeh, who moved to Cardiff in 1990, was among the early founders of the Warriors and also spent years playing for Tiger Bay, Butetown and other local clubs. He said the goal was to bring people together around sport, but also to create a team which represented ‘the areas of some of our fathers and grandfathers.’ 

‘We’re proud that we’ve made a team which creates a pool of mentors, gives kids something to take pride in but also preserves the values and culture of our area,’ he says. 

Subscribe now

The two teams have become a sporting monument to the spirit and history of the docks, which both clubs draw upon to shape their identities and reaffirm their connection to the area’s history. This is evident in Tiger Bay FC's decision to move from the Marl in Grangetown in 2010 to Canal Park, as well as in the symbols used on club badges and the choices of the clubs’ names.

Wales also plays a significant role in this, and the club’s success has enhanced their agency and their ability to define what it means to be Welsh for them. Football has become a vehicle for the community to carve out space within the broader fabric of the city, the clubs a couple of tiles in Cardiff’ rich mosaic.  

‘We’ve overcome the stigma associated with the area, and now we’re being celebrated,’ says Ahmed Noor, the Warriors’ manager. But he isn’t satisfied with that. ‘We want to strengthen this team and reach the highest possible level in the Welsh leagues. Just imagine how incredible it would be if ambitious footballers from here didn’t have to leave, but instead had this fantastic club right on their doorstep.’

Faisal Ali is a Guardian multimedia journalist who has previously written for Cwlwm on how Wales’ music scene has been inflected with Multicultural London English.

Bitterly cold. The sun was setting at what felt like midday and the streets reflected that cold cobalt-blue of the sky, mixing with the orange street lamps. I’d walked past the beach which was still having considerable work done to it. The JCBs lined up looking derelict, aimed towards the Gwynt y Môr wind farm. I’d turned up into the town, underneath the A55, and found the monstrous orange Conwy County Council building, which has that jutting out roof that I still don’t understand. It loomed over the town, looking at the decaying high-street and the regular smokers outside of the Prince Madocs. A man fell out of the betting shop, slipped on the icy ground but he would’ve fallen on his own volition, I’m sure. Heading past Ivy Street Car Park and the fly-tipped remains of countless trips stacked against the graffitied wall, no flies because they’d all drowned in the rain, I cut through the Bayview Shopping Centre, which feels like a time capsule from the early 90s. Pale white walls and food court fading into a gaunt grey. I got a Costa coffee (which, nine months on, has closed) and swung back round to the road with the food bank on it, then kept walking up, past the park and into Old Colwyn.

I felt like I had to go as it was one of the very few networking events that goes on up here. You have to be in the room to hear the conversation, I kept telling myself. Kene was leaving as I was arriving. I think he was directed towards me, Hip Hop heads generally are, and he gave me the grand plan for the Underground Artist Movement (UAM). Forming a collective and offering a free under-18 studio for Colwyn Bay and the surrounding area. He was brought up in Colwyn Bay and left the area, much like me, before returning. I’d just got back from finishing my music production master’s in Manchester and was eager to pursue music, most likely elsewhere. Back to England, maybe back to Cardiff. So, when you hear exactly what you want to hear, you are naturally sceptical. I didn’t know Kene and I didn’t know if this was snake-oil or the answer to my prayers. But nine months down the line we have all the equipment and we’re only waiting on a desk before we can open officially. 

I go by M. Yesekaon as an alias, and I produce and perform all my own work. I’m not against having other people be involved; there was a necessity to do it by myself because I couldn’t afford to pay for things. Still can’t to be honest. My interest in Hip Hop began when my uncle passed me his hard drive when I first became conscious as a boy. Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Wu-Tang, N.W.A. This is what I was digesting at twelve and shaping what would later become an integral part of my life. However, at the time, I did think that this music was an impossibility for someone to create from where I’m from, and quite frankly, cringe.

I’ve since had the realisation that this was because of the lack of structure and the lack of role models providing an avenue for me. Which is bizarre because everyone listens to Hip Hop and rap, but nobody is brave enough to pursue it. The pursuit of Hip Hop isn’t even about signing a record deal or hitting big numbers on Spotify. It’s striving to be better than you were yesterday and showcasing that. The four elements of Hip Hop (DJing, MCing, graffiti and breakdancing) are fundamentally about creatively showcasing skills confidently. The bigger, the better. The smarter, the better. The riskier, the better. The props achieved along the way by people also in the know. This mind frame pushes the genre forward because it can never be complete; it evolves with the people who practise it. It also shows how, without an infrastructure of Hip Hop culture, nobody local would ever get the props from doing the work, putting in the hours, and achieving something.

So, on this jagged coast with unique stories, where the rain peppers the sand much more than the sun shines upon it, why should our stories be unworthy of this form? Cringe doesn’t really cut it anymore.

Our closest major city is in England, which sucks away a lot of people. Growing up, a lot of my peers’ aims was just to leave; mine was too for a sustained period. Cardiff oftentimes feels so alien compared to Liverpool in this respect and although we’re Welsh, we are six hours away by train and being directed to Cardiff for music events isn’t feasible. This is especially the case when it comes to MOBO (music of black origin) and a gig is basically a networking event. So providing shows has become the bedrock of UAM because it gives people something to aim towards.

Our latest show, ‘Bars In The Bay’, was at the Colwyn Bay Community Hwb, a large old hall situated beside the council chambers and adjacent to St Paul's church in the middle of the town. The sunlight streamed in through the windows at the top and we clambered up ladders to put makeshift curtains of cardboard over the summer light. Martin Daws brought the PA system for the venue and the artists assembled with DJ B.Lou conducting the decks. The merchandise had been made for Bangor native A Gent Orange, as he was headlining with myself (M. Yesekaon), B-Mellow and Harvs Le Toad supporting. The crowd filtered in and listened intently to each of the artists before the cypher allowed others to collaborate with the evening. We then packed up and went to a local bar to host an afterparty where music was played acoustically, djembe and guitar, and rappers got up to preview their bars and join in with the event. At these moments, it feels like the audience gives as much as the artists and everyone is free to express themselves and be listened to. We always meet new faces that feel the energy that we want them to. It’s a movement, as the name suggests, a wave, the hop.

And it’s funny how a form originating thousands of miles away, among African Americans in the South Bronx, can make you feel Welsh. For me, I feel like I’m adding to the diaspora of Hip Hop, whilst also paying homage to the speck of soil my family finds themselves on and paying homage to the families that were here before. Oral traditional storytelling is well documented in Welsh histories and the role of the bardd was important to a Celtic society. So, relaying our own histories and lives verbally is something we’ve been doing for centuries. As Sioned Davies refers to in Storytelling in Medieval Wales:

Three things give a poet amplitude: knowledge of histories, and poetry, and heroic verse.

That sounds like Hip Hop to me. But is it a surprise that these elements are shared across cultures and centuries? From Homer to KRS-One to Kendrick Lamar to Dave Acton to The Mabinogion, we’re just telling stories as humans do, trying to find the truth in our lives and make our mates say, ‘that was sick, man’.

Beyond the heavy theory for why I make and why I want to encourage others to make, we’ve been building this community with workshops and gigs. Martin, one of the other founders of UAM, has been delivering workshops for many years and has been up the ladders in the studio like the rest of us. He told me when we first met that “it’s a dream I didn’t know I had but I’ve since come to realise it’s something I’ve always wanted. Setting roots somewhere and sharing ideas from words and music.” From the first brush stroke to the finishing touches, from the chance meetings in bars to sharing bars on stage, the collective has been delivering opportunities to artists that didn’t exist eight months ago, and we have our eyes on more. We’ve all got our links to Larynx Entertainment and we’re slowly making our way into schools and youth groups; you’ll see our stickers throughout the Bay and encroaching into Bangor and then switching back further east. There’s not only a crying need for expression in Colwyn Bay but a desperate need for tangible expression. You might think poetry is wack but you’ll get in your car and listen to Central Cee or Wu-Tang because you think it’s dope and you’ve got bars yourself, but you’ve never had the chance to try it. Rap isn’t the sort of thing you step up for at the sleepy, cozy open-mic in Betws-y-Coed. Well, we’re bringing the cyphers and the studio.

I wanted to give you the story leading up to the grand finale – “…and here is the studio finished!” – but we still don’t have the elusive desk. Mañana. 

I went to the studio last week. Summer was over and we crept towards winter with rivers forming from clogged storm-drains, autumnal leaves and cigarette butts fallen in the slits. Inside the studio, the paint was dry. It looked clinical. The lights were up on the wall, that day they were crimson-red but with a thumb gyration they could be sage-green, whatever the mood suited. The vocal booth stands in the corner, dead sound within. The plan is to have a graffiti artist come and use it as a canvas. I sat on the podcast couch with acoustic treatment in-built and put my laptop bag on the wooden custom coffee table. Kene was going through a new opportunity regarding schools. Martin popped his head in and wanted to go through the plan for a workshop on Monday, whether we could use BandLab to introduce some digital music making elements to the class. The conversation drifted to when we could feasibly start the free under-18 studio sessions and how we should promote it. Boxes of audio equipment, the temptress in the room, lay neatly piled by the wall. Waiting. Indigo’s guitar leant neatly upright against the Adam Audio studio monitors that were practically begging to be hooked up. I move the kalimba to one side on the table, push past the UAM stickers and take my laptop out. Shaneo wanted to record a verse for something I made so he would be here shortly. He’d just started his job with the scaffolding company and was writing like he never had before. My usual style is mellow and chill, but this beat was dark and heavy, something he resonated with when I played it to him. I mentioned to Kene an idea to host a beat-making competition: provide a sample, open it up to producers. I felt like we needed a prize other than “well done,” but it could be a good tactic for spreading the word on Instagram to rappers and producers alike. Kene’s phone vibrated.

He studied it for a while before showing us.

Shipped 12:34.

Share

Calum Noakes (M. Yesekaon) is from Colwyn Bay, Conwy, and has been making Hip Hop since 2022. He is the in-house producer at UAM and a freelance creative practitioner/writer. He was selected as a Forte Artist in 2024 and continues to make music out of North Wales.

It would be a Leckwith Still Life in the shadowed stadium, not centred on a particular match or goal – this is not sportswriting, neither Nick Hornby nor Nick Fisk – just Earnie suspended in amber as a period piece, trademark somersault encapsulating those uncertain early years of the present century, before social media and the smoking ban, when the Millennium Stadium played temporary host to Cup Finals while the FA rebuilt Wembley, the Millennium Centre was still mired in recriminations about the non-adoption of a design by Zaha Hadid, and the newborn National Assembly for Wales still met in a mundane chamber deep within a redbrick office block, making it easy to mistake for Glamorgan County Council on stilts. 

The goal celebration of my Cardiff dreamtime would be emblematic, following just one of the 86 that Robert Earnshaw scored for the Cardiff City Football Club during that prolific first spell, the dates of which – 1998 to 2004 – coincide with my own uncertain youth and young manhood, when Kings of Leon still had beards. 

It would be a winner of course, or a late equaliser – the kind of strike that seems to lift the very sky, blowing the brains of fifteen thousand souls, dopamine bursting through veins already thick with adrenaline and booze; the kind of goal where ball-in-net bulge sends scores of Burberry-clad boneheads careering down the concrete steps of Bob Bank and Grange End; fathers, grandfathers and uncles ruffling roughly the heads and necks and torsos of sons and grandsons and nephews, while still more grown and grizzled men embrace strangers with wild nightclub abandon. 

And with the goalscorer himself poised upside down, hands outstretched above the glow-green turf, my Cardiff freeze-frame also finds overzealous teammates crashing over advertising hoardings, swallowed by exuberance, lost in a forest of flailing limbs and bluebird tattoos on varied body parts, faces lit with unbridled joy among scarves and caps and copious Stone Island coats. 

While we are on pause, let us also stop to consider what all this feels and sounds like, and what it smells like too. For this is not simply the sight of a blue-shirt army, arms aloft in spontaneous ayatollahs that will later coagulate into ritual prostrations around the four sides of Ninian Park. It is also the deep volcanic roar from behind the goal, a sound that shakes seagulls from the rafters of the rickety old ground, this crumbling century-old temple of peeling paint on terrace railings, steel pillars and plastic seats, wooden signage and corrugated iron roofs. 

Behind the corner flag between Grandstand and Grange, riot vans park next to burger vans amid the fug of slow-burn cannabis resin, the odour of asphalt and onions, Bisto steam, stale beer-farts and wet Alsatians. The glower of impending violence haunts the melancholy web of netting that shields off the away fans behind fluorescent jackets, orange stewards and yellow police. But in this moment, which flickers back now into a moving picture – Earnshaw landing on his feet to be mobbed by beaming teammates, players now half-forgotten by all but the die-hards – the song is simple. Unlike so many of the unsavoury chants that have skidmarked the afternoon with their casual bigotry and threats of violence, suddenly the singing is wholesome and cheerful and clean. 

It is a wartime song about sunshine. A song about love. Its original release – oh so appropriate – on Bluebird Records. It goes like this: You are my Cardiff, my only Cardiff, you make me happy when skies are grey… A paean to our city as much as to our team.

Above us all, the sky is a Ffestiniog shade of slate. And for those thousands of us standing rank and file in Bob Bank and Grange, or sitting in the serried seats of Grandstand or Canton – those of us who have made the pilgrimage here on foot from Roath and Riverside; on buses from Llandaff and Llandough, Penarth, Pentwyn and Pentrebane; trains from Aberdare and Aberfan, Ystrad Mynach and Ystrad Rhondda, the pathetic fallacy is strong. 

Streaming to the ground via pints and songs and plenty of swear words, in pubs that have now closed down or changed their names, we have come to the ground with our lives tucked away in back pockets like the crumpled blue stubs of our tickets: dysfunctional families back in Danescourt, ex-wives in Adamsdown, broken dreams in Butetown and Barry and Bedwas. 

Later we will laugh and sing and lean across bars in the Neville and Mitre, Cornwall and Corporation, Westgate and Goat Major, in Dempsey’s and Kitty Flynn’s, the Old Monk and the New Addie, the Clifton and Canadian, the Bertram and Splottlands, the Admiral Napier, Royal Exchange and Canton Cross Vaults. 

And before we are taken by taxi or train or bus, crawling back to every corner of this sad and sodden city, there will be a döner wrap or chicken off- or on-the-bone, our spirits lifted for an hour or two by beer and curry sauce and the memory of Earnie in flight, before our own lives touch down like discarded polystyrene trays, washing down the gutters of Crwys and City, Cowbridge, Corporation and Clare – our Cardiff arteries clogged with Miss Millie’s and Chicken Cottage, Uncle Sam’s and Rocket Joe’s. 

But in this moment we come together, we feel together, we are together, truly. And the feeling finds expression in the simplicity of the song. You make me happy when skies are grey – you’ll never notice how much I love you, so please don’t take my Cardiff away…

As Earnshaw spins, the city is set in aspic, set out in diorama like another developer’s masterplan. Only this time it’s not what the future looks like, but the present exploding in the past. Ninjah banging bin lids in the middle of Jim Driscoll’s funeral, Toy Mic Trevor crooning across Crockherbtown Lock, Shaky-hands Man bothering people for a penny as they alight from trams amid the terraces of Temperance Town.

And then of course, Earnie lands, and Ninian Park itself comes crashing down, and a brand new field of dreams is turfed out across Bartley Wilson Way. 

But with footballer in flight and floodlight, we can’t yet see the future unfurl. A man with a topknot and thunderous thighs lining up a freekick. A septugenarian folk singer fighting back tears in the rain. Bucket hats. Sage Todz. We can’t see the smoking ban or social media. We can’t sense the sudden unfurling of the rest of our lives, marriages and children, and the way perhaps that goals won’t always mean this much.

All we can see is the beaming smile of an upside down striker. And for today, that’s more than enough.

Dylan Moore is co-editor of Cwlwm.

Words claimed as a baby – “Šta je to? Ko je to?” – my first framework of understanding, spoken out to steep rain drizzled hills, sheep pens and clear rivers. “What is that? Who is that?” I ask, but the Welsh soil stays silent, and I must draw on memory for answers.

This year, back in March, me and my partner Jack flew out to visit family on my mother’s side. An important trip to do before our wedding later in the summer; an opportunity for Jack to meet my Serbian relatives, this whole other half of my identity and history that he had only a vague sense of through stories. An opportunity for me also to return to a place that is both foreign and familiar, whose essence I carry like an heirloom, an artefact that I’ve made my own.

Serbia is a landlocked country on the northernmost edge of south-east Europe, a mountainous pocket bordered by eight other countries, including Albania through the disputed territory of Kosovo. It was once part of Yugoslavia, which saw six Balkan states united from 1917 until its infamous break-up in the 1990s.

The country has a long history of rising up against its occupiers, oscillating between forming coalitions, intermingling different languages and religions, and protecting itself against encroaching forces – a wild pack animal turned hostile under threat.

To sum up the eternally proud and defiant – sometimes confusing – Serb mentality, one of the biggest national holidays is on 28 June, marking the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. This doesn’t mark a victory, however, but a glorious defeat. The medieval Serbian kingdom was seized and the Ottoman empire ruled for more than five hundred years.

Jack and I arrive in Belgrade with the sunset. The sky is soft and orange as we walk to Uncle Jaki’s car, a huge modern spaceship that was provided by his employer, a Swedish company that spray paints electrical items.

We drive to Novi Sad on the wide stretch of highway. Passing petrol stations, familiar signs for food products, the low murmur of Serbian voices on the radio as we chat, eager and nervous, energised by the cold burst of the AC.

Uncle Jaki lives with his wife Dragana and their three kids in a quiet neighbourhood of the city. Their lifestyle is what we would understand as middle class (though the class system doesn’t really exist there in the same way). He runs the factory with his brother, she’s a lecturer in architecture. They go on regular ski trips to Austria, cruises in the Baltic sea: all perks of his job. Their daughter Jana goes to boarding school in Budapest.

On our first night, the boys – my uncle, cousin and Jack – set up to watch a night of sports; both the basketball and football Partizan teams are playing. Me and Dragana take little Uroš to the shopping mall nearby, a huge, pristine sanctuary which doesn’t feel typical of all public spaces, and clearly signifies the steady embrace of capitalism. We drop Uroš off at a children’s play area which feels like a benign kid's prison – a stroke of genius as it lets parents do more shopping in peace.

Subscribe now

As Jack is vegetarian everyone makes a big effort to veer away from the usual meat-centric dishes, going heavy instead on the cheese, yoghurt and kajmak, a thick clotted cream that is served with everything.

We go to my grandma Baba Rosa’s flat for lunch every day, just round the corner. One room with a small balcony. A sofa that turns into a bed. Dining table with fold out plastic chairs. All her cooking done on a tiny oven with a two top stove, like magic. She serves plates of gibanice – an oily filo pastry cheese pie – roast peppers stuffed with grated potato and onion, rice baked with roast vegetables, bean stew, soups, clear broth, fresh hot green pepper on the side, enriched bread, all with Jaki’s homemade rakija to start. This one is quince: amber colour, pure fire water. He makes it in Čortanovci, a small village nearby where they have a summer house.

(A note on rakija, Serbia’s national drink: a potent fruit brandy that is usually made from plum, grape, apricot and pear. Everyone’s grandma teaches them that rakija cures everything – colds, stomach ache, heartbreak, etc. – and it’s not unusual for them to start the day with a shot. In fact, my own Baba Rosa confidently proclaimed that she “has never drunk alcohol” only to then join us in an aperitif before lunch. Rakija isn’t seen as booze, but as medicine.)

Baba’s TV is always on, either sport or a wildlife show. She loves animals, feeds the stray cats outside her apartment block, coos girlishly whenever a baby elephant or tiger comes on screen. Cluttering her shelves and fridge space are photos of her grandchildren. On the walls, my mum and uncles with ‘70s fringes and large collars.

We communicate through broken Serbian and English, offering these shards to each other earnestly with lots of hand gestures, our sense of meaning and understanding getting broader and more forgiving. When I was born she came to Wales for three months to help my mum with childcare. Baba Rosa always speaks of this time with a warm kind of pride: I’ve heard the story dozens of times, her taking me for walks in the pram, feeding me blackberries and chunks of banana, going to sleep with our black cat Shoni. Each of us with our palms full of shared memory (“Here, look, the water is from the same source!”) trying not to let it seep through.

Every meal ends with a strong Turkish coffee: the classic Serbian way, the grounds cooked in a džezva – a small jug on the stove – with water until it boils. It is served black with sugar in small cups, complemented perfectly by a cigarette, a pack of which Baba always keeps stashed in the dresser, for her smoker friends when they come to visit.

The smell of cigarettes is synonymous with Serbia. All of my memories are decorated with the low chemical hum of stale smoke: balconies, terraces, restaurants. Almost all my relatives smoked when we were kids. Now a lot of them have quit, but generally it’s still a tobacco loving culture: Serbia has the sixth highest smoking rate in the world per capita. I see it almost as joining in with a local delicacy you might otherwise avoid – like snails in France or guinea pigs in Peru – I don’t think twice about buying a pack of Marlboro Golds a day, when usually I’d be a strict smoker-on-occasion. It comes with the territory.

Novi Sad is the second largest city after the capital, Belgrade. With a modest population of just over 360,000 it’s a manageable size, skirting the edges of the Danube as it runs down from Hungary, its centre full of elegant architecture that calls back to its Austro-Hungarian rule in the 19th century.

We walk into town, passing small kiosks on the way, surprising standalone cottages amongst the tall apartment blocks, edged with grass and rubble. The main square is generous, with the impressive town hall and cathedral standing proud. An old man with a long white moustache and sad, tenacious eyes sits on a stool, wearing the traditional dress: knee-high woollen socks and pointy peasant shoes, playing the gusle, a traditional fiddle whose strings are made with horsehair and whose sound drawls out, lamenting.

My uncle Vanja is a jazz guitarist, so invites us to see him play in the synagogue, a lively music venue as well as a practising place of worship. We meet him round the back where he’s pacing, chain-smoking, wearing a black suit. He wouldn’t seem out of place in The Sopranos, he’s got that tall presence, and an almost Italian lilt (“Ehhh, come on!”). His face lights up when he sees us, the undeniable warmth of family, regardless of distance in miles or years or language. He, like everyone, is visibly excited to meet Jack (pronounced Jek).

We go for a beer together afterwards, to one of the many narrow side streets. Irish bar, busy courtyard. We wear our coats but it feels like summer, with the buzz in the air and the music. He tells us about the difficult transition from full time musician gigging every weekend, travelling on cruise ships, to taking over the factory with his brother. Trying to do both is exhausting.

I ask Vanja why he never came to visit us in Wales like Jaki did. He says the plan was that he would, and he was about to leave but couldn’t get a visa. He must have been a teenager then. That was during the war.

Jaki came to stay in the late ‘90s, during the tail-end of the Yugoslav War; it must have been during a parting of the clouds which permitted travel. He remembers a lot (his family call him ‘the Elephant’ because his memory is so good). It’s funny to hear him say Welsh words and names, the remote mountains of Eryri feeling so incongruent to where we are now: Jaki’s flat, the small kitchen table laid out for breakfast with drinking yoghurt, burek, fresh cheese from the market; a different world, from the smells to the road signs.

He remembers his stay fondly and asks about the people, the pub. Shortly after he returned home to Novi Sad the TV station was bombed. All the floors shook like an earthquake and there were regular blackouts. I ask if he ever got involved in politics at all, seeing as he was so directly implicated. There was once a guy who looked a bit like Jesus, a politician who seemed like a good guy, Jaki says. “But then Milošević turned up to one of his demonstrations with tanks, and I thought, yeah, maybe not for me.”

It’s always been hard for me to understand how we as a family still managed to visit most summers all through the ‘90s. As a child, things were normalised and taken at face value, such as broken bridges, piles of rubble, old women begging with black headscarves, in mourning. I accepted all of this as an integral part of this other land, a natural phenomenon. Once we had to fly into Hungary because there were no flights permitted into Serbia, so we travelled there overnight on a minibus. That was all part of the adventure.

Needless to say, none of my family are outwardly political. Having lived through the recent brutality which saw neighbours and friends in conflict due to mutated beliefs, I can imagine there is a wariness around passion or extremism, and a disillusionment in the government.

Currently, Aleksandar Vučić is the president, a figure who has been criticised for undermining democracy and has roots in the far-right. On the other hand, many people are fans; he is seen to have united the country and provided economic growth, as well as securing EU candidate status despite committing to Serbia’s historic support of Russia.

We go for a drink one evening, find a courtyard off the main pedestrian stretch. Graffitied walls, pasted-on posters, loud music coming from the bar. Inside it’s all spit and sawdust, Berlin-style tattered furnishings, a flag of Botswana, just because. Drinking different shades of Zaječarsko beer and chain-smoking outside, we meet a young guy with perfect English (which always puts me to shame with my limited Serbian).

He tells us more about people’s politics here. That really it’s only the two big cities that have any progressive views, everywhere else is pretty backwards. For example, in the countryside they only have one channel which is pure propaganda. (“It’s embarrassing, they’re not even trying to hide it.”) When his grandma went to hospital recently, she met an old woman who was scared to use the toilet. Apparently she’d never seen one before and would usually “shit in the woods”.

His attitude seems pragmatic yet resigned. There doesn’t seem to be that many opportunities for young people, no real prospect of earning much money. Like one of my older cousins, he speaks of studying abroad. Interestingly, he’s proudly religious, regularly attending the Orthodox church. He likes the sense of tradition and morals. This feels contradictory somehow: this politically switched-on, cultured young guy who also goes to church with his dad? It’s hard to imagine such an overlap at home.

Subscribe now

Back to Belgrade, by train this time. We’re in the real city now: sprawling and loud, 1.6 million people, every street lined with casinos and cosmetic clinics, kiosks and dirty pavements. The smell of commotion and old smoke. High-rises and history and imposing government buildings.

My auntie Sandra meets us outside the station, waiting for us outside her red Skoda. Tall, blonde, like an AI version of a Slavic Barbie, she runs up to us to greet us, crying. We squeeze our bags into the boot and I sit in the front with her as we crawl through the late afternoon traffic. On her mirror hangs an assortment of air fresheners and decorations (glitz, beads, fur). Her voice is so low it’s almost a growl, years of diligent smoking, although now – she says, puffing a vape – she has given up. “I want to smoke from my eyes, my nose, my ears. I do everything with passion.” Her loud, manic cackle. Quick to laugh – and to cry.

She lives on the outskirts of the city, in Medaković, a neighbourhood largely made up of identical tower blocks with orange-tiled Alpine roofs. Stray dogs sun-bathe belly-up next to the market, aggressive hooligan graffiti everywhere, the shopping centre strangely derelict, with flickering fluorescent striplights and boutiques selling cheap Chinese clothes. This isn’t middle-class Novi Sad. There is an air of not so much danger but of distinct hardship: our coddled Cymraeg sensitivities are piqued, survival instinct on alert due to its otherness, even though I have been here throughout my life, that child-like acceptance has given way to an adult wariness (and admittedly, judgement).

We stay in an Airbnb a five minute walk away from Sandra’s in one of the identical apartment blocks. We’ve almost certainly been charged too much but it’s clean and modern, and we have a balcony which I always enjoy. We go over to Sandra’s for dinner, she lives with her mother Dika (Mama’s stepmum), her son Nikola, his partner Kaja and their three-year-old son Gale. The flat is small, technically two-bedroom, but they’ve all managed to squeeze in by commandeering the living room. Nikola is away a lot working, meaning it’s very much a matriarchal household. Three generations of women looking after this small child and the cat, Srce (Heart), a white-furred savage who is known to attack.

Mirroring our lunches with Baba Rosa in Novi Sad, we come here for dinner every evening. Dika cooks her version of gibanice, Serbian-style musaka made with potatoes, roast peppers stuffed with rice, šopska salad made with feta cheese. Floating islands and chocolate pudding. Cans of Zaječarsko beer. The TV turned up full volume and Dika’s Winston cigarettes the ever-burning incense. On the walls, framed portraits of Sveti Nikola, their family saint.

Sandra works hard as a nurse in the maternity ward of a local hospital. Even as she approaches her mid-fifties, she’s still the most striking woman I know, her and her twin sister Irena, who lives on Cyprus, were always the exotic glamorous counterparts to what I was used to at home: Mama’s natural, hippie, sugar-free minimalism, a rejection of flashy femininity. Sandra’s beauty is unapologetic. Botox, fillers, tattooed eyebrows. Long legs and high heels. She shows us her TikTok account which has gained an impressive following, mostly selfie videos, heavily filtered.

Dika tells us of the love she had for my late grandad, Deda Milan. Even though they divorced and he was engaged for the sixth time when he died, she has always been devoted to him and never got close to another man. She speaks of him like a godly figure, a watery reverence coming over her as she recalls visiting him in hospital, when he confessed that “she was always his favourite.” When they first got together, she remembers, he was arrested for taking down a portrait of Tito off the wall in his rented apartment and spent months in prison. She proudly recalls how hard she worked as a mother of newborn twins whilst living with elderly in-laws, cooking for everyone, snatching time for housework whilst the babies slept.

Jack being a football obsessive, we visit the Partizan stadium, the Serbian team which he decides to adopt. It’s closed, so it has a deserted air, the outside walls all covered in black and white murals, the team’s colours, skulls, gothic, anarchic fonts, living up to their nickname, ‘The Gravediggers’. Black and grey hooded crows peck at leftover plastic wrappers. There is some questionable Russian and Viking adjacent imagery that reminds you how tied up it all is with violence and extremism.

The Partizan-Red Star rivalry is infamous, the derbies being particularly chaotic, often descending into full on riots. Hooligans – or ‘ultras’ – are heavily linked to organised crime and paramilitary groups, with many games being host to volatile slogans such as “Kosovo is Serbia”, breeding grounds for nationalist fever.

During our trip we hear tales of grotesque violence, told casually as gossip, such as criminal ultras grinding bodies into sausage-meat in the underbelly of the Red Star stadium. German police were recently on high alert before the England–Serbia game in the Euros, as there was considerable threat of unrest. Speaking to my cousin Nikola, violent crime is very much a day to day reality, and being part of these two factions is a sad inevitability for most young men. Famous ultras such as ‘Ivan the Terrible’ hold mythic levels of respect; being arrested is almost seen as a sign of success, recognition that you’re causing enough havoc.

Right in the centre of Stari Grad – Old Town – on the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, is the Kalemegdan Fortress and surrounding park. Site of Belgrade’s origins, as once the entire city lay within these walls. Belgrade is one of the oldest cities in Europe, known as Singidunum, originally a settlement belonging to the Celts in the 3rd century BC before the great migration of the tribe to the western edges of Europe – a surprising link to our own Celtic connections back home.

On the fortress grounds we come across the Chapel of Sveta Petka: small, modest-looking, covered in vines, dedicated to the mediaeval Serbian female saint, protector of all things woman (whose feast day happens to be on my birthday). Sacred stillness in its cold walls, decorated with murals and relics. We light skinny amber coloured candles next to the burning collection outside, and make a wish.

We go for coffee in Hotel Moskva, a gorgeous, grand, old-time building sprawling generously across the intersection of three busy streets. Its beige and green tiles look like it could be from a Wes Anderson set; it has the same sense of kitschy class, the waiters dressed in pristine waistcoats, live music from the grand piano in the foyer, lone older women wearing fur coats and sunglasses, taking their time. Established in the early 1900s, the establishment was built with Russian investment and was originally known as Rossiya Palace. Having existed for over a century, the site has been a backdrop for all kinds of historical moments, housing a group of modernist writers and the Gestapo in World War II. Past guests include weighty names such as Tesla, Einstein, Hepburn, Sartre.

With the wind blowing, the clinking bright music swimming through the terrace speakers, we watch crowds pass, tourists and workers heading into the grey fumed city. We eat the hotel’s trademark dessert, the Moskva šnit, a layered cream cake made with almonds, sour cherries, pineapple, and Petit-Beurre (unbeknownst to us, soon to be the first layer of our wedding cake).

We ride back to our apartment on the hour-long tram, stood up and packed in, feet heavy and tired, mind crackling with the exhaustion of sight-seeing. I observe the passengers, these strangers to whom, by the fact of DNA, I am loosely tethered. All along one branch of my ancestral history our experiences would have aligned, yet now I’m a weird hybrid, one half taking it all in, the other half simply belonging.

All through this trip details resonate, like objects dropped into a pool. Ripples: slow circles spreading to the edges of memory, language, time.

The temperature of the air, the long rakija-soaked lunches, the smell of popcorn as you walk down a street at night, the lack of embarrassment, the warmth. That Serbian self-assurance, the pig-headedness and big heartedness, the suffering, the violence simmering underneath and next door. Everyday superstitions, saints, cups of coffee spread out on white tablecloths, embroidered with lace and cherries.

This is my home. Cymru is my home. My family is here. My family is there.

I feel an expanse of emotion that I have been able to come back and re-enter this world.

These objects, picked like fruit and savoured. I bring back the stone to plant on Welsh soil: I pour out the spirit in clear glasses to share.

Silvia Rose is a published writer, tutor and freelancer born and raised in Eryri. Spanning poetry, short stories and nonfiction, her writing is largely inspired by her Welsh and Serbian roots.

Share

My dad had insisted on moving to New House in 1977, wishing to remove himself from life and people, but mostly people. Our house cowered at the edge of the valley, hidden from view of any cars winding their way up the tiny back road into the hills we inhabited. The farmhouse had one of its four walls leaning outwards, and the attached barn lost its roof in a storm shortly before I was born in 1980. There were no rambling cottage gardens for me to play in, only stacks of brick and piles of sand – the equipment needed for the many and numerous restoration projects – so I ventured further afield for my amusement. The fields that surrounded our house were my playground. I named each corner, my own frontispiece map: Spook Hall was the eerie coppice of trees in the front field, the Stone Table (with apologies to C.S. Lewis) was a large flat outcrop of rocks behind the house and the Pool Tree was an ash with a deep indentation in part of its trunk that filled with water in the autumn.

My little patch of Welsh Teddy Bear expanded briefly when I attended primary school. Then Dad had a run in with the headteacher and I was removed from school. The anxiety I still feel in the pit of my stomach on remembering early encounters with her suggest that his assessment may have been astute. His belief that he could homeschool us was less accurate. This was step two of his masterplan: that he wouldn’t get a job; he’d stay at home and homeschool me and my siblings, and he would finish renovating the house. He removed us from life and people too. But mostly from people. I was to spend the next seven years on that hilltop.

Being homeschooled was great, at least on days when Dad sat silent and dull-eyed in his chair, smoking and drawing black squares on his reporter’s notebook. Realising that his depression had enveloped him, we slipped out, grabbed our bikes and raced around the drovers’ paths on the hill. We explored hedgerows, finding old bottles, blackberries and rusted cart wheels. We ran and shouted and whooped for miles, never seeing another soul and making as much noise as we liked. On days when Dad was bright eyed and whistling, we held wood while he sawed it, mixed cement, sand and water in a wheelbarrow and ferried it to him in buckets, we held the torch while he worked underneath the Land Rover. There was very little homeschooling taking place. This Wales was small, and we were told it was beautiful, but knew nothing else, and the postmen – often the only people we saw from one week’s end to the next – talked of another Wales altogether. 

Subscribe now

As isolated as the Wales of my primary school years was, it was predictable and familiar and pure. Being thrown from this into the middle of secondary school was brutal and noisy and cruel. Suddenly I was getting up early every day, catching a bus full of strangers, wearing itchy nylon skirts in a shade of maroon I’d never encountered before, and spending my days in musty classrooms of thirty peers. I didn’t know their rules and I didn’t speak their language. I didn’t know how to function in that level of hostility and was completely unable to defend myself. I was unaware of the slang and inferences and would spend my mornings bewildered and humiliated, holding everything in, then I’d go behind the science block at break time and unleash the lump in my throat, hastily wiping away hot tears of fear and confusion before heading into the next lesson.

Gradually, I found my way and I found my tribe: initially a group of girls in my form who were all essentially good. We laughed and worked and fought, and with time I realised I was surviving – better than that, I was enjoying it. Later, after a year or so of flute lessons I was asked to join the school orchestra and with that discovered the music block and its crowd of misfits and beautiful people. It was whilst waiting for a lift after a rehearsal I was first asked: “You’re not Welsh are you, Polly?”

Suddenly it was something I had to own up to. Was I Welsh? Well, I’d always lived in Wales… but my dad was English? And, my mum had been taken over the border to Hereford hospital when I was born, so I had Herefordshire on my birth certificate. No, they confirmed, you’re not Welsh. I realised in that moment how many of them had arrived in Wales from elsewhere. From Hull, from Gloucester, from Liverpool, from Salford. And how aggrieved they were about it – that Teddy’s outstretched arms malevolently beckoning them to this land that was so much less cool than its neighbour, with its Eisteddfods and Welsh lady costumes and unpronounceable place names. I needed this non-Welsh group. I needed entrance to it and that was that: I easily renounced any ties to Wales.

As I moved through my teenage years things didn’t get any easier at home. Dad became more and more reclusive, more and more controlling; he’d sit visibly brooding if my mum went out to a work meal. I never joined my peers at parties or pubs; I spent Saturday mornings cleaning the house while mum worked her third job, trying in vain to make ends meet while my dad slept in until late morning.

Around this time we had discovered Craig Fawr. A short walk from our home, it was a small cliff face jutting out of a hill overlooking the river. It was quite magically staged, in that you opened an innocuous-looking gate, wandered into the field and only as you rounded a clump of trees did this incredible view open up in front of you. You could see both sides of the valley from this height and the Wye meandering its way between them towards Erwood, both sides of it carpeted in a patchwork of soft fleecy fields. It was a perfect place to sit in the early evening and watch the sun set. Something about a view like that humbles you, places you, and some of my deepest, most meaningful conversations happened there. Also, incidentally, my first kiss. 

The summer in the middle of my A-levels my sister and I went halves on a Sony Walkman which played cassettes. I listened to it whilst ironing in a nearby guest house (my summer job) and as Stevie Wonder played the harmonica solo in ‘For Once In My Life’ a slough of really dreadful suppressed memories bubbled to the surface of my head. I reeled, feeling nauseous, and looking out over the River Wye, I knew I had to get out of Wales, and I had to get as far away as I reasonably could. I had to make sense of everything that’d happened. The impatience, the anger, the shouting, the day Mum came home from work and found us cowering under the trees in Spook Hall, while Dad ranted and raved at us. This poisoned bear had loosened its clutches momentarily, and I had a way out if I had enough courage to take it.

Mum wouldn’t drive on the motorway; we had to be quiet as she came into central Hereford so she could concentrate on the big roundabout, so anything with more than two lanes was well out of the question. I often wonder if I was the only student to arrive on the train with their worldly possessions in bags, carried by their siblings. Years of my dad telling me how appalling cities were and spitting the words ‘council estate’ out like foul saliva, meant I was terrified of what city living would do to me. The basic brick built halls of residence on campus seemed cramped and my room – magnolia walls and beige lino – was soulless and uninspiring. I already felt lost and without a voice in this place. Mum put the duvet cover on the stained bed and my sister helped me put up my Rubber Soul poster. Later my mum was steered away by the shoulders, crying, by my ever practical little brother and sister, and I went back into my beige room, feeling wretched. A tall girl with jam-jar-bottom glasses and a feathery fringe wandered in companionably, eyed the noticeboard and said: “Are they the Beatles? So… which one’s which?” 

And so it began. An odd misfit in maroon Doctor Marten boots from Llandod market, I careered through the first term, managing to not quite fit in. “You’re Welsh? You don’t have an accent…” A disappointment again – not Welsh enough. “Wales? My friend’s at Cardiff Uni. Do you know Cardiff?” I didn’t know how to explain that I only knew my little patch. That we’d not had holidays, or day trips, or visits to other parts of Wales. The second that term ended I got on a train, changing at Newport station for my final connection. The drop in air temperature from the south of England made me gasp. I sat on a bench waiting for the Abergavenny train, a surly man sat down a few feet away, appraised me briefly with a flick of his right eye (the left was looking somewhere else entirely) and muttered “Fucking wazzock.” This frosty version of Wales was most definitely giving me the elbow. 

My first year at uni was spent hurrying back, calling regularly, worrying about my sister who was having a rough time settling into the high school I’d just left her alone in. Then came year two and I met someone who would change it all. It wasn’t what I’d expected, she wasn’t what I’d expected. There was no effortless slide from friends to lovers, it was messy and disjointed, with fear on both sides. I feel like everything in our initial friendship shifted after a weekend spent together in Wales, where perhaps I made sense, a lonely puzzle piece finally slotted into the right background. The landscape that shaped them. The future was a blur of confusion, not knowing where we might end up or if we’d be accepted. The only thing I was sure of was how I felt. That it was real and powerful, and that however much it scared me, I had to go with it. I walked into my hairdresser one day and asked her to cut all my hair off. Her name was Dee and my recollection is that she resembled Cerys Matthews, but perhaps the desire to be shepherded through this formative experience by the Catatonia front-woman is entirely poetic.

It took me some time to share this relationship with my family. And, to quote Andrew Scott’s character in the movie Pride: “There’s not always a welcome in the hillside.” The best response was from my sister – fourteen at the time – who said it was ‘weird but ok’. The teenage shrug was audible. On every other count there followed telephone conversations with long silences, heart-sink moments when stepping down on to Abergavenny platform, and journeys in a Peugeot 205 thick with unspoken thoughts. For some time, I would visit this hateful version of Wales only when I had to, and slept curled up on the floor in my sister’s room, as if her acceptance was elastic and protected me only as long as I didn’t stray too far from her. This Wales didn’t love me or want me; it mocked me, telling stories of ‘P***s’ now running the local garage (“It’s a sign of the times”) and mimicking Asian doctors at the GP surgery. How had this place ever felt like home?

Years went by and visits happened only a few times a year; things got worse, they got better, they stayed the same. There were a few pockets of comfort and much indifference. After twenty years of emotional abuse, my mum left my dad. He started drinking, and gradually turned Simpsons-yellow as his liver gave up. On one of my final visits, I ran outside the back door and sank to my knees on the gravel rather than watch him dry heaving over the sink. Mum moved into my grandad’s old house in a little village near Builth. The house was so bound up in my memories of them, their wartime-founded 60-a-day cigarette habit that turned the inside of the house a dirty yellow, Grandad eating bread and butter with every meal and Gran’s penchant for pink painted nails. Gradually she made this house her home – a new kitchen, new bathroom; my brother worked some wizardry with partitioning the space upstairs. On rare weekends when all siblings were home, we sat wedged into an impossibly uncomfortable stop-gap sofa and giggled, taking the mick and enjoying each other’s company for the first time in some years. She asked me to house-sit once and in the middle of an incredibly stressful Ofsted-flecked period of my life I found so much peace down by the river. The cool water, pottery sherds and pebbles that had delighted me as a child recalibrated my brain, and despite a partner who was almost imperceptibly slipping away from me, I emerged from the weekend stronger. 

Fast forward again and after ten years together and a drawn out, cowardly break up I was suddenly 32 and single. I spent what I termed my ‘Bridget Jones Christmas’ at mum’s cottage in Wales. My grandparents’ house was two doors down from the village pub which made for a very ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ feel. I was viewed as something of a witch as I could work the new fangled iPod they’d installed in the Seven Stars. It was thrust into my hands several times with requests such as: “Hey love, has it got any Stones on it?”. Long after the bell for last orders’ reverberations had faded away and the last stragglers ushered out, I’d be in bed, semi-conscious, as snippets of conversation drifted up through the small square windows. Talk of having to get up for church in the morning and complaints about the dog at the bungalow barking. We didn’t have Organ Morgan but Evan Evans lived a stone’s throw away up Dan-y-Coed Lane. 

And just like that I was tucked firmly and squarely back into the arms of the teddy bear – and found it surprisingly snug after all our feuding. The familiarity and comfort of the village after the city was almost overwhelming and after all the years of loving and renouncing and fighting and doubting, I knew it felt like home again. 

After ten years of being in a relationship with someone who sat at home knitting, watching dog videos on YouTube and gently nurturing their individual insecurities and paranoia, I was ready to live and to adventure. Not for the first time in my life, I grabbed onto my brother’s shirt-tails and followed him out to the Middle East. He played guitar in a band out there and earned the good tax-free salary they rewarded expat musicians with. I planned to find a British International school and continue to teach primary school children. The weather was glorious of course, the endless gleaming shopping malls were initially fun, but pretty soon it became clear that although company could be found for the night, it would be difficult to find any long term commitment. Where to find my Prince?

He showed up in terrible brown trousers to our first date at a Greek restaurant in Southampton. Blue Island had good reviews but bad wiring, and the waitresses wore pink tabards like school dinner ladies. He had curly hair, a soft Lancastrian accent, a nice smile and he talked and listened in equal measure.

And so the final chapter of my story (so far) ends with a baby. Albert was born in Southampton in 2016 with my husband and my mum at my side. After almost two days of labour he was finally hauled into the world and dropped onto my bosom as I lay in the golden pain-free glow of an epidural. This glorious boy – so anticipated by his grandmothers – was soon whisked to Wales to be shown to his kin. And this is where I suddenly saw the magic of my homeland again through his eyes. The white woolly streamers of sheep’s wool on each barbed wire fence, the yew tree in the churchyard with the trunk that he could climb inside, the corked amber glass bottle in a hedge discarded at some long-forgotten ploughing party. The tiny toes in crisp cold water, chancing among the wavering layers of pebbles in the River Edw. Out and towelled in the sunshine and running bare-bottomed across the meadow, clutching a Welsh cake. This is the teddy bear I loved and that loved me.

Strangely it has taken me until this summer to show my children my childhood home. One afternoon in late August, out of money, out of ideas and fed up with squabbles, I piled them into the car and we climbed into the hills. After a ramble passing a few mini landmarks, we are at the gate, looking down the lane to my New House. “It looks like a haunted house”, says my girl. It doesn’t, of course. But I am disarmed by the comment, and I know for me it is always haunted by the Englishman who so terrified me there. 

A few days later and we are less than half a mile from this spot at my aunt’s house celebrating the birthday of a cousin. The day dawned grey but by 3pm the sun is out and the view across the valley is incredible. The cousins bicker and pick at party food, climbing trees, chasing hens and talking to the horse in the next field. Near the end of the afternoon, I line them up on the grass, that stunning panorama behind them, and take photos of them grinning, sticky arms around each other, toddlers held in shot by anonymous arms. And I know that this is where their story will start too. That they will probably fall out with Wales one day, long to be elsewhere, long to leave, go away and love another, lie warm in that embrace for some time. And I wonder if – like me – they’ll return, and fall in love all over again. Because, honestly, right now, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

Polly Grace is an occasional author from a little market town in mid-Wales. She is usually found with a laptop on her knees after the children are in bed.

Share Cwlwm

When I was younger, waking up to see the foam green barriers and the prowing stays meant the final stretch of a journey – a quick about turn at Newport then dual carriageway giving way to single carriageway giving way to lanes before home. Then, we all agreed that the green was an awful choice, ‘Severn Bridge green’ a shorthand for the most unattractive shade between green and turquoise. Maybe it’s the colour of the sun today but now I’m not so sure – I guess time does that.

When viewed together, the new bridge is so much more pedestrian than the old: a cautious staking of pillars into the mud, a gnashing green mouth of a bridge compared to the soaring elegance of the white one which still feels the more modern, stepping lightly off the architect’s drawing onto Beachley, before leaping over in one go. That one is a true suspension bridge, but then again the modern one has its rugby posts and a ‘harp design’ stay arrangement – a coincidental nod to cultural vernacular.

Up comes Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ on my Spotify queue, that ducking bassline and clapping drumbeat readying me for the swoop and sweep of the river and the bridges.

The Mississippi delta
is shining like a national guitar.
I am following the river down the highway
to the cradle of the Civil War.

Our civil war is too far gone – although the images of police blockades on the Severn bridges during Covid lockdowns was enough to quicken the pulse of some – but I’m looking for something.

I’ve always been struck by the simplicity and blind boldness of that first couplet. For a nation of song, we’re never so confident nor so clear. I’ve just come back from America, where the roads unfold like stories and stories seem as straight and wide as the highways. We’ve no such easy idiom to describe places like I’ve come to today – in general we’ve not achieved their easy mythology of the modern world. We’re at home amongst the trees and the rocks, we’re even getting there in the panoramas of post-industry, but our backwaters and byways are resistant to eulogy. But if it can happen anywhere, I think, it can happen here, cruising over the mudflats of the Severn – our own Mississippi. In a peculiar way, I’ve got a feeling that this is where it happened – this is where it all started, at the end of things, at the end of the Severn and the end of Wales.

The Severn is steeped in stories; it is charged with meaning. When the new bridge was renamed to the ‘Prince of Wales Bridge’, the petition to stop the renaming reached 38,000 signatures. Despite it now being the big-ticket entry point to Wales, this method of making the crossing is relatively modern as the default choice. It was borderline impractical before 1966 and downright dangerous enough in 1727 that Daniel Defoe chose to divert all the way up to Gloucester (inexplicably via Chipping Sodbury) rather than chance the ferry:

When we came to Aust, the hither side of the Passage, the sea was so broad, […] the tide so formidable, the wind also made the water so rough, and which was worse, the boats to carry over both man and horse appear’d […] so very mean, that in short none of us car’d to venture: So we came back, and resolv’d to keep on the road to Gloucester.

It all feels like a bit of a tangle to be straightened out. We know some of the facts: there’s two bridges, the old one and the new one whose name we don’t like, and there’s a railway tunnel replete with pub quiz facts about how much water enters it and how often the rails need replacing. There’s a famous photograph of a ferry crossing, and there’s another much less famous ferry crossing and there’s a final railway bridge.

And then there’s the bore. I think often of the Severn bore – it occupies my dreams. A rare tidal phenomenon, it is caused by waves starting out in the wide Atlantic, moving at 700 miles per hour. When they get closer to Europe, their speed is reduced by the continental shelf, correspondingly increasing their height. Taller and narrower, slower and higher, the bore enters the Severn from the sea as a fifty-foot-tall swell. This is what Defoe was so frightened of: ‘those violent tides call’d the Bore, which flow here sometimes six or seven foot at once, rolling forward like a mighty wave: So that the stern of a vessel shall on a sudden be lifted up six or seven foot upon the water, when the head of it is fast a ground.’ Biblically, the waters reverse themselves and the tidal wave rides up the Severn towards Gloucester. A front, hundred of miles wide, is refined to a pulse strumming down a line along the river that divides England from Wales.

Except of course, it isn’t ever really the border in any clean sense. The Severn captures the contradictions of the place: the totemic river of our border, born in Pumlumon in Powys, spends most of its time in England and only actually forms the border for about one kilometre near Welshpool and these desolate banks in Gwent. From Chepstow you can cross the Wye northwards or the Severn eastwards to find England.

But none of this is making it any clearer. This place is older than all that – the Kingdom of Gwent held court in Portskewett; the Romans were here. Its patterns are made by the river but they move like the tide – ebb and flow, washing away the old too quickly to make something of it. It’s older than Wales but it’s perhaps one of our most famous locations now. I went to Severnside looking for something but I’m not sure what. Maybe in our foyer, our last chance saloon, I’d find something that made sense finally ‘of Wales’.

The roots are certainly ancient here, even if they struggle to hold onto the banks. My first stop off the motorway is Portskewett, found down a tangle of B roads, first through Magor-of-service-station-fame, then Caldicot, all older than but fundamentally arranged beneath the two vast roads that carve along either side – the M4 and the M48. Caldicot high street is quiet like a Western at 10am on a Saturday. In fairness, it’s raining a bit by now, fine and urgently, but within ten minutes it’s ragged sun again and the silence remains.

Portskewett church is yellower and browner than you’d imagine. Cadw insisted, a man opening up the little museum in the churchyard tells me, that they limewash it a traditional colour when it was renovated. But the difference between now and when the church was built, when everything was limewashed yearly, is that nobody can afford the time now for limewashing, and nobody will stump up the money either. I struggle to see the church as it would have been, surrounded as it is now by modern housing and in its strange, bedraggled carnival colour.

The museum itself is in a hovel – no more than four metres by two – that used to exist outside the churchyard before it encroached in need of space. It is well restored and holds a wealth of information on the area. A walking group are imminent and will expect teas, coffees and squash when they arrive. They’re walking between three churches today, the man explains, and ending with a lunch. I struggle to explain my own journey in response: I’m here because I’ve been here too many times before without wondering what was underneath the bridge, I say. And also because I know the bridges weren’t always here, so I want to understand what came before. ‘You’ll need to head down to Sudbrook I’d have thought then,’ he says after some reflection. So I step back out into the blustering, weak sun.

Sudbrook is a village with a purpose. Two long streets stretch down towards the estuary either side of a railway line now closed but still bisecting the village with an unkempt eco-garden of buddleia and bramble. At the end loom the pumping towers – big Victorian buildings that are as essential today as they ever were. The Severn tunnel, you see, cuts straight through a spring and would flood rapidly if it weren’t for the constant efforts of the pumping towers. Another spring, the one that brought the Gwent rulers down, closed up when the tunnel was dug, as one moment of history gave way to another, as two nations were girded together for the first time by transport. The Bristol economic area, anyone?

The best view of the pumping towers I found was from the Roman camp, whose name is self-explanatory enough, and next to which sits the ruins of a medieval church, three different eras stacked next to each other like books on a shelf. From closer by on the street, its harder to see them as more than just looming buildings, fences, gates and warning signs – some relevant, some still under the impression the railway runs through here.

Sudbrook is a frontier village, formed on the cutting edge of innovation. It housed the workers who built the Severn railway tunnel, some of whom lived in some of the first concrete houses in Britain. Shipbuilding and a paper mill later occupied its residents, three muscular industries that presumably gave rise to the sports and social club, now in part the Tunnel Centre, devoted to the history of the building of the tunnel. Technicolour Thomas the Tank Engine murals crowd out the dim corridor of the Centre and the exhibition room is locked. I head back out into the drizzle and cock my camera shutter – quickdraw.

By the time I walk over, the drizzle has moved on and clouds are sculling across the New Passage. They’re the last ferrymen here, carrying rain showers like messages between the two banks. Previously, another railway veered off before Sudbrook and ran to the pier at Blackrock, where you’d disembark for a ferry and be met by another train on the other side. The hotel on the English side, designed for knees ups when the river was too rough for the crossing, became a fashionable spot of its own to visit on day trips from Bristol.

All this came to a sudden end when the Severn tunnel opened in 1886, allowing trains to move directly between England and Wales across Severn for the first time. Suddenly Cardiff, Newport and Barry make so much more sense when you realise that the easy passage of freight into England from south Wales only began in the final fifteen years of the nineteenth century. By 1891, Cardiff was 129,000 people and exported millions of tonnes of coal a year. Yet five years earlier you had to wait for a ferry between trains to get to England.

On the Welsh side, it seems the tracks were dismantled and the smaller inn converted to housing. Now a picnic area fills the site in the shadow of the new bridge, bisected by the desire paths of years of children’s chases. There’s the shed of a fishing club whose ancient handheld-net-based method of salmon fishing is barely any longer allowed by Natural Resources Wales, so they’ve closed up shop in protest. A man is instead fishing for crab at the old pier whilst his daughter stomps across the rocks. Above them, bisecting sky, rock and sand at Bauhaus angle is the new bridge thrumming up to its morning capacity. The father has come up for the day from Bristol. I don’t ask him which bridge he crossed, or if he’s thinking about the ferry which he could have stepped onto 150 years ago. Instead, I’m thinking about my own father, and a site of pilgrimage of sorts that we went to sixteen years ago just over the water.

Before too long and one border crossing later (old bridge), I stand in the waving rushes at the Aust ferry terminal, barely peeking out of their summer growth to see our old friend, the white bridge, off in the distance. The slipway wasn’t as overgrown when I was here with my dad aged thirteen, and the refreshments hut and ticket office, complete with turnstile and urinal, still just about stood beneath brambles. Now, that’s all gone, swept away by a tidal defence system that has replaced the gentle slope to the river with a hard wall, protecting the houses above. Pushing through the rushes, I’m wrong-footed as the slipway deck suddenly runs out – only the pillars left heading out towards the water. I’m alone and suddenly feel vulnerable to the quicksand and the tide. I nervously check my phone for when the high tide is coming. The rushes whisper and chatter around me as I look beyond them at the bridge that spelled the end of this ferry crossing.

In its final days, in May 1966, a cool 25-year-old Bob Dylan stood on the same jetty waiting for the ferry crossing. Barry Feinstein took the opportunity to take a picture of him. He was on his way from Bristol to Cardiff as part of his infamous first electric tour; he looks pretty tired of it all. Behind him, like a pale ghost retreating, is the Severn Bridge, waiting to take over just four months later. The last ferry to cross the Severn was the day before it opened.

Just upstream from Dylan’s photoshoot – out of sight, definitely out of mind – was the Severn Railway Bridge, struck (not for the first time) by boats carrying petrol in 1960 with predictable result. The rushing tide pulled them upstream of the entrance to Sharpness Docks and, shrouded in fog, they collided together and then collided with the bridge. That bridge, an awkward 90 degree turn on both sides of it, connected the railway line at Lydney on the ‘Welsh’ side (still in England) to Sharpness and its canal to Gloucester on the English side. In 1966 it was still mostly complete, but its fate had been sealed by further collisions since 1960 and it was demolished in August 1967. Supporting that work was the Severn King, just relieved of its duties at the Aust Ferry a few months before. In 1969 it too crashed into the pier of the half-dismantled railway bridge and was scrapped. This must all mean something to local people, because the Severn Princess (rumoured to be the ferry in service for Dylan’s voyage) was saved from abandonment in Galway, Ireland to be towed back to Chepstow where it awaits restoration.

The famous photo later adorned the poster of the documentary No Direction Home about that tour. Standing at what was once the main route into south Wales for motor traffic, you can certainly feel it. At every place I go, the past seems to have just left, with only ghosts in its place.

Dylan also has a song about the Mississippi:

Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

There’s a very different version of our border here, of our relationship with England, but it’s hard to find – you can’t go back all the way. The pulsing, swelling, alive Severn is too unstable to hold any simple narratives of place, community, or border. Pulling together everything in its catchment – the ancient history of invasions, the more recent histories of transport and industry, the great bridges doing the work for the relationship between the two nations – the river is swollen with meaning it can’t sustain.

Share

But all the same, life goes on around it across all the changes. I think enviously of the lower Seine in France, where small boats called ‘Bacs’ ply between towns on each bank, taking foot passengers and no more than ten cars at a time. They don’t operate on a timetable, they just ricochet for free between the banks, building a weave of interconnections across an otherwise insurmountable border. When the Severn Railway Bridge collapsed, the children of Sharpness lost their school in Lydney. The end of the Old and New Passages was the end of some small villages’ time in the spotlight: Defoe’s ‘little dirty village call’d Aust’ became barely worthy of a mark on a map. Dozens of small, never documented ferry routes further upstream disappeared without a trace and villages that once looked into each other’s eyes now sit distrustfully in opposing encampments. Sometimes the tide is so low that you could almost walk across; sometimes the Bore is rushing past, warning them never to try.

I still think of the bore. Perhaps it was a bore that took the entangled Arkendale H and Wastdale H upstream into the explosive embrace of the railway bridge – a modern day Nodens on his seahorse, riding up his river into battle with connectivity, with the joining of kingdoms. The Severn, the leaking wound of Pumlumon, rushing back upon itself like an omen, a river in reverse searching for its cot fellows, the Wye and Rheidol. Surely the centre will not hold; maybe there never was one at all, just the rushing tide up the river, coming bearing the flotsam of our jaded, ragged culture, sweeping away the certainties, washing away the mountains like sandcastles, leaving our beaches littered with the detritus of ourselves to be picked up and made again.

Or maybe it’s easier than all that – the toll is gone, the crossing is free, the journey is one made in a heartbeat. I stand at the end of my own journey, looking down at the wrecks of the boats at Purton ship graveyard. The tide is low and the foundations of the destroyed bridge can still be seen. Families explore and play amongst the ships’ remains as the weather finally cracks and rain comes down thick and hot. We all run for shelter but there’s none to find – the river has stripped the banks bare. Eventually, I get back to my car down at the yacht club, flushed and damp, and turn it back towards the bridge and towards Wales.

Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long.

Merlin Gable is co-editor of Cwlwm.