Squaring Up

Squaring Up

This spot in front of the Millennium Centre is where there used to be a bridge across the lock gates separating Cardiff’s first dock basin opened in 1839 from the new Bute East Dock extension excavated to the north in the 1860s. The second dock is now landlocked and useless in a 1990s makeover known as Atlantic Wharf. These landmarks are reminders of the time when Cardiff was meeting most of the world’s demand for coal to energise the industrial revolution. In the grand scheme of things, the coal culture of South Wales was short-lived, reaching its peak in 1913, when a record 10.7 million tonnes came through the port. By the 1960s the derelict docks, with their rusting coal hoists, cranes and weedy railway sidings were the lifeless corpse of this enterprise. It was what we negotiated in the early 1970s on family bike rides across the narrow, shaky old lock bridge from Butetown. However, East Moors steelworks was still operating, spewing out dense steam clouds from the cooling plant. We used to wait until there was a gap then make a quick dash through the massive iron gates into Splott and Adamsdown before the next blast engulfed us. I can now see that we were literally witnessing the last gasp of South Wales’ industrial culture. Now this upheaval and where there was a swing on the hinge of history is encompassed in the idea of ButeTown as a Community Square Mile which illustrates a rash of 'the new' on 'the old'.

However, what emanated from the Secretary of State for Wales’ desk during the 1980s was a blueprint for transformation that hardly affected the lives of the communities that had made the docks work. These were the people who streamed daily through the dock gates; a flow of three generations of labour commemorated in the remaining iron gate post holding up a wall in Bessemer St. The remarkably cosmopolitan culture was filmed in the 1959 murder thriller, ‘Tiger Bay’. After all, Cardiff Bay is a recent renaming by the Development Corporation’s marketing team of the City's once infamous "Tiger Bay" Docklands.

Actually, my first personal contact with Butetown was when I was led there by a group of my students in the late 1960s. I had arrived in Cardiff from Sheffield and the students who came down with me soon discovered a duplicate of the industrial culture of coal and steel they had left behind in Sheffield’s Don Valley industrial corridor. For the more adventurous, the life of old Tiger Bay was still to be found in and around the network of pubs centred on the Coal Exchange. I particular remember the dockland end of Bute Street was dominated by the massive theatrical Portland stone façade of Nat West Bank. At night it turned the street into an ill-lit canyon. Conceived in the 1920s, this, one of the biggest branch banks ever built, was a bank too far. In fact it was the final expression of old time investment in the development of an unsustainable port facility on the Marquis of Bute’s grazing pastures far beyond Cardiff’s town wall. Even then the empty headquarters of shipping lines, chandlers and boat repairers were monuments to past prosperity. Today, even more of these commercial monsters lie without purpose, too big and far away for little old Cardiff’s call centre and shopping economies.

I particularly remember discovering the remarkable terrace of so-called ‘captain’s houses’ lining Windsor Esplanade and looking across to see the high tide seeping over the salt marsh in front of the houses to lap against the sea wall. Another memory of the ecological fringe of Cardiff Bay was finding alien plants thriving on patches of wasteland that had come from far and wide as seeds attached to ships cargo and ballast. These rare plants had been the passion of Roy Smith, a maintenance electrician with Cardiff Corporation. He was a gifted amateur botanist, who in 1921 joined the Botanical Society and Exchange Club of the British Isles to communicate his findings. Over the years he thoroughly explored the docks and waste ground in Cardiff and Barry, deriving great pleasure in the often difficult task of identifying unfamiliar alien plants. Roy formed a small herbarium of these migrants, from as far away as Africa, which he presented to the National Museum of Wales. One of these plants, a wild carnation, was found on the embankment of the railway that used to serve Gadlys Ironworks in the Dare Valley, being carried there, presumably on railway wagons loaded with imported iron ore. Roy Smith is a reminder of the explosion of skill and creativity that was Tiger Bay.

My memory of tide lapping against Windsor Esplanade reminds me that human progress is all-change. During the New Stone Age, the Severn Estuary was dry land and an open plain through which a smaller river coursed towards the sea beyond Gower. The high moorland of Exmoor would have been a focal point that rose dramatically from the plain, enticing hunter-gatherer groups to cross the wetland environment. However, the deepening of the estuary at the end of the Mesolithic meant a loss of territory. This prehistoric culture is now being revealed as discarded flint tools, nut shells and footprints on the eroding mudflats.

The ingrained human quest for wealth that made Cardiff a metropolis and brought about its rebirth as a waterfront residency for the rich and a playground for the leisured, has thoroughly unmade the mudflats of Cardiff Bay. During the construction of the barrage I was associated with an educational initiative to promote the involvement of Bay schools in action plans to blend the communities they served into a new waterfront neighbourhood. But integrated development did not happen. Now, the rich and the poor just about glimpse each other across the railway line from Queen St. What happened to plans for a daring promenade around Penarth Head and the shiny monorail to link Bay with Castle?

In a recent blog, Nottingham-based city planner, Adrian Jones, criticized the council’s planning department over the ‘end of pier’ piecemeal transformations that have taken place in the area.

Jones’s blog claimed “Cardiff Bay is a consequence of the failure to plan properly. It is not really about the buildings – many are dreadful, most are nondescript and a few are interesting but this is not much different from regeneration schemes up and down the land”.

“What singles out Cardiff Bay is the desperately poor relationships of buildings to the water, which is the raison d’être for the whole damn enterprise in the first place, to streets and public spaces and the lack of any attempt at place-making.”

A commentator on Jones’s blogpost, who recently bought a flat in the area, went on to add that the Bay had a ‘total lack of amenities’ with the nearest doctor being a 45 minute walk away and her local corner shop being an superstore. Another commenter who just moved to the area aired his concerns saying that as a non-driver, he found so much of the Bay to be‘non eco-friendly’.

The truth is that the barrage and its infrastructure was paid for reluctantly by Whitehall in yet another ‘them-and-us’ confrontation between the City Council and the Welsh Office. There was never enough money for social integration so the Bay has turned out to be an island rather than a hub.

Where does all this lead me? Maybe its an awareness of the rich history made here, but to my way of thinking it all adds up to the Butetown square mile being a good international model for measuring and promoting a better understanding of how to create an inclusive relationship between culture and environment. This is an expression of the fourth objective of 1mile².net, namely to promote the art of noticing; in particular detecting links between cultural and ecology. In an operational sense, cultural ecology is a managerial blend of nature and localism. These days, planning is a bottom-up rather than a top-down affair. It is something shaped from above by enlightened decisions and a light touch, aimed at matching life styles with Earth’s productivity.

Noticing and reporting are now very important skills of education for citizenship. They are central for creative literacy to produce images that map past and present and continue social progress into a sustainable future. The lesson of Butetown is that real lasting community change is built around knowing where you are, where you want to be, and whether your efforts as a stakeholder are making a difference. Indicators are a necessary ingredient for sustainable change. And the process of selecting community indicators -- who chooses, how they choose, what they choose -- is as important as the data you select. Here the task is to use art to draw attention to little known corners of your chosen square mile that make your heart sink or sing.