For now your name is over their name, over the subway manufacturer, the Transit Authority, the city administration. Your presence is on their presence, your alias hangs over their scene. There is a pleasurable sense of depth to the elusiveness of meaning.
– ‘The Faith of Graffiti’, Norman Mailer, Esquire (May 1974)
27 May 1999. On Bute Street in Cardiff’s docklands, a man crouches in the middle of the road, lining up a shot. In an hour’s time, the Queen of England is due to pass this way in the landau she normally uses to attend horse races at Ascot. Together with her husband and eldest son – the heir to the throne, a man whose title has borne the name of the nation since 1282 when its last native prince was killed – she is en route to officially open the National Assembly for Wales, a new institution that will give the country a degree of self-governance for the first time in more than six hundred years.
Nick Treharne has had plenty of time to prepare the shot. Wales voted ‘Yes’ to devolution by the narrowest of margins almost two years earlier, on Thursday 18 September 1997. The photographer had been outside Cardiff City Hall to document the moment Donald Dewar, who was to become Scotland’s inaugural First Minister, and Ron Davies, who would famously not go on to fulfil the same role in Wales, stood together in matching donkey jackets emblazoned with the words ‘Ie’ and ‘Yes’. Davies had pulled a large red plastic sheet from the side of an ad-van to reveal the slogan: ‘Scotland Voted Yes – Don’t Let Wales Get Left Behind’.
Fast forward to May 1999 and the photographer has his camera lens trained on a different kind of slogan. Not a paid-for advertisement in the corporate red and white typeface of New Labour but a graffito askew and askance, capital letters running upwards on a neglected segment of wall near the heart of one of the capital city’s poorest districts. It is a curious phrase, at once subversive and comical, radical and enigmatic, its apparently overt nationalism at once undermined and enhanced by that strange interloping middle word, lending the phrase its poetics, making it mysterious as well as memorable. INDEPENDÆNT TROPICAL WALES.
Time has accelerated since the dusk of the twentieth century and the dawn of devolution. The past is a foreign country in which Nick Treharne had no idea whether he had captured what he wanted until he returned to the darkroom. But as soon as he saw the image, the photographer knew he had what Henri Cartier-Bresson famously called ‘the decisive moment’.
‘I may be remembered,’ Treharne laughs, reflecting on the picture a quarter of a century later, ‘for that 1/250th of a second.’
1999 was Wales’ own decisive moment. Although the date resonates in political history as the year devolution arrived, people’s memories of the time more often revolve around iconic moments in culture and sport and how the country’s cultural renaissance intersected with their own lives. A month before the shutter on Treharne’s camera snapped open to spring sunlight on a Bute Street wall, 76,000 packed into Wembley Stadium in London to witness a most memorable finale to the last ever Five Nations rugby championship. Scott Gibbs’ late try secured a single point victory for Wales in a game played at the home of English football because the National Stadium at Cardiff Arms Park had been demolished to make way for the Millennium Stadium, the city centre spaceship that would finally land later in the year, in time to host the Rugby World Cup.
Two days after the opening of the Assembly, Catatonia played in front of 30,000 people at Margam Park outside Port Talbot. Later in the summer, Stereophonics entertained 50,000 at the also-now-demolished Morfa Stadium in Swansea. By the end of the year, Super Furry Animals would ‘Mash Up the C.I.A.’ before Manic Street Preachers brought down the curtain on the century in front of nearly 60,000 at Cardiff’s new rugby cathedral, a show that marked the high watermark of ‘Cool Cymru’, shorthand for a period that marked a permanent sea-change in the cultural confidence of the nation.
The Manics – who refused to play in front of the royal family at the Voices of a Nation concert for the opening of the Assembly – were at a commercial and critical zenith, sweeping the board at that year’s NME Awards: Best Band, Best Album, Best Live Act, Best Single, Best Video. Meanwhile, at the 72nd edition of the Academy Awards, Solomon & Gaenor, starring Ioan Gruffudd and Nia Roberts, was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film. Justin Kerrigan’s Human Traffic captured the contemporary club scene as Cardiff became a nightlife destination, marketing itself as ‘Europe’s Youngest Capital’.
But this new-found cultural confidence came in sharp contrast to the economic and social inequalities that have continued to characterise Wales before and after devolution. The country’s first five-star hotel, St David’s, opened in the redeveloped Cardiff Bay at the same time as West Wales and the Valleys – an area accounting for two thirds of the nation’s population – was designated an Objective 1 area for European funding, its GDP per capita less than 75% of the EU average. Then as now, Cymru: a land of contradictions.
Elin Jones was one of the first cohort of politicians elected to the Assembly and is now the Llywydd (Presiding Officer) of the renamed Senedd. One of the few surviving members of the so-called ‘Class of ‘99’, she has been the Member for Ceredigion for quarter of a century. Jones saw Treharne’s photograph in the Western Mail on the day it was published and remembers: ‘It immediately struck a chord. A fabulous photo capturing the whole melting pot that is Wales in one image. TROPICAL suggests vibrancy, while INDEPENDÆNT is an aspiration. You’ve got the royal family, the head of state, but it’s very firmly in Butetown, with local residents in the shot. It’s full of the contradictions of twenty-first century Wales.’
Seven or eight years ago, Elin Jones began proactively trying to find the picture, admitting that she had doubted herself. ‘Did I ever see that photo? Am I making it up?’ she thought, thinking the image in her mind’s eye perhaps too perfect.
But a quick internet search brought up Anthony Brockway’s Babylon Wales blog, which for more than a decade (until now) has been the only place the photograph could be viewed on the internet. From there it was easy to track down Nick Treharne, who kindly printed a copy that hangs proudly in Jones’ office: ‘a reminder of the very, very early days of devolution’.
Although herself a republican, Elin Jones remembers being pleased with ‘the whole idea that the head of state was coming to Wales, ratifying the choice that the people of Wales had made’. In a sense, she says, the Queen was ‘giving Wales back to its people’ and, while she knows the comparison doesn’t really hold up, goes on to say: ‘it was almost like in other Commonwealth countries like India [when they achieved independence] – a sense that everything could be made possible.’
Jones concedes that 1999 was ‘not quite independence’. In fact, she admits claims the Assembly was a ‘talking shop’ had some validity in those early days, so limited were the powers of the institution. ‘When I was elected in 1999, Aberystwyth Town Council had more fiscal powers than the Assembly.’
But she also says 1999 set the country on its way. The profile and powers of the Senedd have grown hugely in the first quarter of ‘the process and not an event’ that is devolution, and in this interpretation, the photograph is a signpost toward independence.
And despite that the Llywydd was criticised for her decision not to attend the coronation of King Charles III, Elin Jones has been at the forefront of the relationship between Wales and the royal family, describing the openings of the Welsh Parliament in 2016 and 2021 and the King’s visit on his inaugural tour of the United Kingdom following the death of the Queen in 2022 as ‘constitutionally significant’.
‘I’ve always found the royal family have understood the new constitution better than the UK Government, of whichever persuasion,’ she says. ‘They have always treated Scotland and Wales, the Senedd and the Scottish Parliament, with respect.’ Her aim has been ‘to conduct these visits in a way that is respectful of a nation and parliament – it doesn’t mirror the pomp and circumstance of Westminster.’
There can be few locations that feel further from the pomp and circumstance of Buckingham Palace, The Mall, and the Palace of Westminster on the occasion of the state opening of the British Parliament than the nondescript wall of the Butetown branch line railway opposite Loudoun Square. This is what lends INDEPENDÆNT TROPICAL WALES its power: juxtaposition and surprise, the gold trimmings of the queen’s carriage in stark contrast to the crumbling render and rusted iron railings of the wall.
But it is precisely these features that betray its great age, hinting toward the myriad ways this neglected structure charts and carries the modern history of Wales. Overseen by that giant of Victorian civil engineering Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the Taff Vale Railway was completed in 1841, linking Merthyr Tydfil – then iron and steel capital of the world – to the docks at Cardiff, the railway brought rapidity to the export of industrial materials from south Wales and was to expand its reach with lines out to Pontypool, Newport and beyond, and later still to the coal boom towns of the Rhondda Fach and Fawr. Today its octopus tentacles are known as Valley Lines and form the basic template of the developing South Wales Metro.
The station being redeveloped at Cardiff Bay, once known as the Docks, is the latest in a series of major redevelopment projects in the area that began in 1987 with a £2.5bn investment to transform the docklands via the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation. And while the area has undoubtedly changed beyond all recognition since those days of post-industrial decline – with a barrage and inner harbour, sports village, retail and leisure facilities, the home of the Welsh National Opera, and thousands of apartments, in addition to the new Welsh Parliament – the toe-end of the Taff Vale Railway remains a physical and psychological barrier between the original community of Butetown and the gentrified ‘Bay’ area that surrounds it.
In Real Cardiff, Peter Finch describes Lloyd George Avenue as a ‘new grand boulevard… behind the railway along which traffic now sweeps from the glittering city centre to the red brick Pier Head and the glories of the all-glass transparency of the Senedd – the National Assembly debating chamber.’ Locals could be forgiven for thinking it is a grand boulevard built specifically to pass them by.
Nick Treharne knew the graffiti was there, knew it expressed a certain defiance and something of Butetown’s history, knew that of all the places on the monarch’s route to the original home of the National Assembly, Crickhowell House, it would make the best photograph – if only he could capture the decisive moment. What the photographer did not know as he was lining up his shot was that he was being watched. A mile away a blimp was floating over City Hall. ‘The authorities must have been expecting people to line the route,’ Treharne recalls, ‘otherwise the Queen wouldn’t have been in a landau – she could have just arrived in a car’.
There were places nearer the start and the end of the monarch’s route where some people had gathered, but in Loudoun Square at the heart of Butetown Treharne says: ‘there was no one – it was me, another photographer and a single policeman.’
Yet surrounding circumstances seemed to threaten the capture of the perfect photograph. After a quiet hour at the side of Bute Street – a straight road in those days before traffic calming measures were introduced – at the moment of the royal passing a couple of well-wishers finally wandered into the street and into the frame. At the time, Treharne says he was thinking get out of the way. ‘But of course,’ he says now, ‘it was they who attracted the attention of the royal party: they make the picture’.
David Hurn, one of the twentieth century’s most influential reportage photographers, agrees. ‘It’s a really superb news picture. You can’t get better. It’s got all the elements in one picture.’ Hurn lists the photograph’s virtues – news value, an alternative angle, thoughtful research, a sense of fun – but says ‘the absolutely crucial element is luck.’
He says: ‘Photography relies incredibly on luck. If you’re a painter, and you don’t like what you’ve done, you can paint over it, if you’re a writer you can edit or start again, but photography is the opposite way around. You start off from a mess. Somehow you have to capture the chaos of what is already there. That in my estimation is far more difficult than painting, or something like that.’
‘The wonderful thing is that it’s a different picture of the Queen that people don’t normally get, so that’s already great,’ says Hurn. ‘And he’s thought about the background so that makes it better. And he’s had a little bit of luck that something has happened in the foreground. And you put all of that together and it’s a remarkable news picture.’ He concludes: ‘To me, it’s as good as any picture I’ve ever seen. There have been others that have been more violent or whatever but in many ways this is better because it’s more thought out. It’s an intelligent photographer who has managed to put all of these things together and come up trumps.’
Despite all of this, however, the photograph might have sunk without trace if Hurn had not offered Treharne one of his famous ‘Swaps’. Hurn explains: ‘I was going through a long period where I was realising that people liked the pictures that I took, and I really liked collecting pictures that I thought were good. If I swap pictures, I’m beginning to clarify for myself what I like. And as with 700 other photographers, I simply said would you swap a print. Virtually nobody said no.’
The original print swapped between Treharne and Hurn has ended up in the National Museum of Wales, following the bequest of the Swaps archive in 2017. Hurn says: ‘this is great because by law it has to be kept archivally there – but that causes problems as it has to be kept in a box. The irony is that the picture will never be seen again!’
While that might be technically true of the physical print the two photographers swapped, the other beauty of photography is of course that it is a work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Despite its strange virtual absence from the internet during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, INDEPENDÆNT TROPICAL WALES has featured in an exhibition and been used on the cover of a booklet about the history of the Senedd.
The real disappearance is of the graffito itself. Unlike other legendary Welsh graffiti – CYMRU RYDD on Y Graig above Machynlleth, the ELVIS rock on the A44 near the border between Powys and Ceredigion, CYMRU AM BYTH // CROESO I’R CWMOEDD on the mountain road between Treorchy and Nant-y-Moel, and most famously COFIWCH DRYWERYN, INDEPENDÆNT TROPICAL WALES has never been repainted.
An interesting quirk that holds these slogans together is the fact that they have often been the result of mistakes and corrections. COFIWCH TRYWERYN was originally painted onto the side of a ruined cottage at the side of the A487 near Llanrhystud by the writer Meic Stephens and his friend Rodric Evans; subsequent repaintings, and the widespread proliferation of the striking white text on red background, have corrected the Cymraeg with a soft mutation. The ELVIS rock developed from a misspelt slogan in support of the local Plaid Cymru candidate, also a writer – Islwyn Ffowc Elis – scrawled by John Hefin and David Meredith in 1962. After the death of the King of rock’n’roll, the extra L in ‘Ellis’ morphed into a V.
In the case of INDEPENDÆNT TROPICAL WALES, there is no reliable information about the author of the phrase, but there is clear evidence that its misspelling was corrected. One urban legend has it that Betty Campbell, then headteacher of Mount Stuart Primary School and a councillor for Butetown ward on Cardiff Council, was responsible for the correction. Unlikely, but a lovely story, and quite likely the writer would have passed through Mrs Campbell’s charge at some stage.
Seen in its original colour, the photograph contrasts three waving hands: the brown hand of the well-wisher, the white of the Duke of Edinburgh’s wave, and the black-gloved hand of the monarch. And although the scene is therefore ostensibly one of mutual respect between royals and deferential subjects, the graffito draws out unmistakable colonial overtones.
The girl in the fuchsia-coloured coat and her waving father are not any old passers-by. In the context of this picture, drenched as it is in symbolism and history, the father’s taqiyah prayer cap becomes a symbol of Butetown’s Muslim population and by extension its famed multiculturalism. Tiger Bay is often celebrated as Wales’ oldest multi-ethnic community, a unique ‘sailortown’ home to more than fifty nationalities from the mid nineteenth century onwards, far predating the familiar post-Windrush narratives of multicultural Britain.
However unintentional, the word TROPICAL splashed across the wall of the railway embankment therefore becomes a reminder of how the English establishment, with the royals at its very apex, once paraded through the dusty streets of a global Empire ‘on which the sun never set’. And while debate over the use of the word ‘colony’ to describe Wales’ position relative to England is fraught with potential for glibness, intellectual dishonesty and downright offence, there is no doubt that the sight of the royal family riding in an open-topped carriage – through Butetown specifically – en route to bestowing a greater degree of constitutional strength on little old Wales in the dying days of the twentieth century, carries unmistakable echoes of Empire.
Of course there is something else about the waving man in the bottom left corner of the frame that situates the photograph in its historical context. ‘If this were happening today,’ says Nick Treharne, ‘people would have had their phones out – to take their own pictures.’
Independænt Tropical Wales would be among the final press photographs taken on colour negative film. Although the first consumer digital cameras were marketed in the late 1990s, professional photographers shifted slowly to the new medium to meet the growing demand for faster turnaround times. It was also around the year 2000 that digital cameras were first integrated into mobile phones. By the time of the Queen’s funeral in 2022, it had become the norm for members of the public to film history – and almost everything else – on their own devices. Thousands of smartphones were held aloft as the monarch’s hearse went by, technologically as well as socially difficult to imagine in 1999.
Twenty-five years on, the graffito has long since disappeared. The Assembly has become the Senedd. The Queen is dead. ‘Carlo’ has become the King. Wales is now a place where you can buy Cofiwch Dryweryn on a bumper sticker and Independænt Tropical Wales on a baseball cap. Welsh musicians have success in what are now often called ‘the creative industries’ without draping red dragons on their amps, and the NME – now a website not a newspaper – has written about Cool Cymru 2.0.
Urban artwork has played a critical role in reflecting the realities of Wales as a modern, multicultural country far beyond the borders of Butetown. There was public outcry when the beloved ‘Mona Lisa’ portrait of Maimuna Indjai on a James Street wall was painted over for a McDonald’s advertisement; a replacement was swiftly commissioned.
Wales now has the first Black leader in the whole of Europe but there is little sign this will make a material difference – little sign, indeed, that his tenure will last much longer. Poverty and inequality continue to blight the nation. Culture and sport continue to overshadow politics. And while Wales’ sports teams and arts scenes have been celebrated for embracing diversity, murals and ‘initiatives’ often feel like window-dressing; easier to commission new artworks to ‘brighten up’ deprived areas than address the socio-economic problems that have crumbled the built environment in the first place.
Twenty-five years on, the verdict has to be that the Senedd has struggled to truly represent Wales’ population or properly engage with its communities. The docks-end section of the Butetown branch line is undergoing another redevelopment, this time as part of the South Wales Metro. Butetown still feels separate from ‘the Bay’. And INDEPENDÆNT TROPICAL WALES? A fragment of disappeared graffiti. A half-remembered senseless slogan. An enigmatic dream.
Dylan Moore is a writer and commentator on the culture of Wales, and co-edits Cwlwm.
Fabulous article ! Puts on the historical record a rounded perspective on this iconic image. Loved it !
Great article. The original iconic graffito inspired my just-released album, 'Tropical Independænt Gwynedd': https://dadw.bandcamp.com/album/tropical-independ-nt-gwynedd