Cardiff Days Gone By: In the Heart of the Cambrian Metropolis

Dylan Moore reflects on twenty years writing about Cymru's capital city, and introduces his ambitious new project to write the Great Cardiff Novel

We are sitting in a pub on the corner of St Mary and Caroline streets, a short walk from Cardiff Central station. We’re talking, as we always do, about the city where we live, the way it keeps changing.

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.

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?’

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.

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.

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