I was born in Cardiff in 1961. In 1981 I left to live in London, and ten years ago I came back. In the days before I left, I never thought about what kind of place Cardiff was. Back then, it felt like a small provincial city, a declining Victorian industrial town, more akin to Wigan or Doncaster than a capital city. It was taken as a given that if you had any kind of ambition, the thing to do was to get out as soon as you could.
The Cardiff I remember was a grey and gritty town, pints of light and dark, closing time at half past ten, chips and curry sauce, cups of tea in the Sarsaparilla bar, Cardiff City going down, bikers in the pubs, and Saturday night's all right for fighting in the one nightclub. And nobody spoke Welsh.
The Cardiff I remember had a wrong side of the tracks. You went under the Bute Street bridge into the Docks and you entered a different world, a world of colour. I don't remember the old Tiger Bay: the opium dens and the Chinese gambling parlours and sailors' pubs called the Bucket of Blood or the House of Blazes. But I do remember the Docks still alive and still full of music, with reggae clubs and any number of blues dances.
The Cardiff I fled was declining, a terminal case. It was a city that used to look out to the world, but its great days were all in the past: world's largest coal-exporting port (circa 1913), won the FA Cup (1927), hosted the Commonwealth Games (1958). When I left in 1981, just as Margaret Thatcher was busy downsizing Britain, it seemed like the whole place was closing down around me. You went to the job centre and there were no jobs there. Back then, Cardiff didn't look out to the world, or in to the rest of Wales: it just looked backwards.
Twenty-six years later, the city has changed, is changing. The former industrial town is busy reinventing itself as a regional capital. It's a European city with street cafés and shopping malls and waterfront theme restaurants and a world-class stadium and an opera house and a Richard Rogers assembly building. There are television production companies on every corner and all the pubs have changed their names. On Friday night in town there are a thousand places to drink until late. Everybody goes surfing on the weekends. Charlotte Church is all over the tabloids. And for the first time in a millennium, it's cool to speak Cymraeg.
So why don't I like it better? Well, it could be because I'm a sad old curmudgeon who can't handle change. But I think there's more to it than that. Yes, development is better than stagnation and decay. It's better that the Docks should be tarted up as "Cardiff Bay" rather than left to rot. But appreciating that argument doesn't stop me from regretting the actual shape of the development. There's something profoundly depressing about walking around the bay's Mermaid Quay shopping and restaurant mall and realising that half the restaurants there are owned by the same giant leisure group, identikit operations that reflect nothing of the individual history of the Docks. Likewise, you can admire the stadium and enjoy the way it has fundamentally altered the city's skyline while wondering what they're going to put in it—on the 360 days of the year on which there's no rugby international—to make it economically viable now that it's lost its role as a stand-in for Wembley.
Follow this line of thinking a bit further, and you start to question the very basis of Cardiff's boom-town status. Is it perhaps less an economic miracle than a cynical switching of resources from south Wales as a whole, cramming the good stuff into Cardiff while letting much of the valleys and Swansea decline? The rest of Wales has always resented Cardiff, largely because it seemed such an alien place, so separate in its culture. And ironically, now that Cardiff is starting to ostentatiously embrace Welshness, in its media, government and cultural life, that resentment is deeper than ever.
Seen in this light, Cardiff, once an overwhelmingly working-class city, is now becoming a city of haves in a land largely of have-nots. The further irony is that the most prosperous of the haves seem to be the Welsh incomers, the Welsh-speaking government and media types from the north and west of the principality, while the monoglot speakers of Kairdiff English have started to feel like second-class citizens in their own city.
Perhaps the way forwards is to stop thinking about Cardiff as a Welsh city or an English city. At heart, maybe Cardiff is more like an American city. Like many an American dock or steel town, it is essentially an immigrant city, born out of the industries of the Victorian era: coal, iron, steel and shipping. It's a city full of people from somewhere else: from the west Country, Wales, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Poland, Somalia, China, Japan as well as the Caribbean and the subcontinent—a city whose people play baseball and ice hockey, and take their holidays in Florida.
If old Cardiff can continue to embrace the modern world and transform itself from an industrial to a service-based city, and if new Cardiff can respect its history and not try to reinvent itself as a centre for Welsh heritage—then maybe it has a future that will suit all of us who live here.
