Cardiff Central - Ten Writers Return to the Welsh Capital

A collection of ten autobiographical contributions presenting the personal recollections and outlooks of ten writers on the city of Cardiff, past and present.

Review :
This very readable collection of autobiographical essays is as pleasingly mixed in style and scope as the visions of Cardiff that it evokes. There a real sense of engagement with the multifaceted richness of a living, developing city. Less that a decade ago, Ed Thomas dreamt of a ‘forgotten city’, a Cardiff rich in possibilities where you could ask to be taken to ‘somewhere good’ and a taxi would take you there. This fantasy depended on a Cardiff dominated by outmoded stereotypes and stranded in a monotonous present. But it’s all a matter of perception: Cardiff was never as simple as those hackneyed stereotypes suggest. There have always been ‘good places’, always alternatives to the reductive clichés of a dull provincial life. The problem was that these stories had been hidden in earlier quests for gentility, just as the accent and voice had been ironed out in a desire for conformity. As Cardiff changes – in part because of political developments, in part because of radical building projects and the new architecture that accompanies them, changing the face of the city – a greater cultural confidence emerges, leading, as in Cardiff Central, to a celebration of localised, half-forgotten histories and, in Lloyd Robson’s case, including the particular nuances of the voices in which they took place. The essays read well together. The Cardiff revealed in this collection is rich, various, exciting. Dannie Abse introduces with the most familiar image of Cardiff: a middle class wartime experience. Peter Finch wanders round the city, excavating layers of stories and voices, the present as well as past, floating off from the new Bay to the remnants of the old dockland communities it uneasily covers. Kaite O’Reilly’s impressionistic pieces stress a strong Irish strand. Gwyneth Lewis’s testimony that ‘if you so chose, you could live your life completely in Welsh in Cardiff’ is thrown in the face of those who, locked into a rigid definition of Welshness, told her in her youth that Cardiff wasn’t part of Wales. It is followed by that Leonora Brito, a fourth-generation Black Cardiffian, with family memories of the Spanish enclaves in Butetown where her grandmother danced Spanish valses and Argentine tangos. The complexity of this multicultural community is reflected in Brito’s immediate family which started life in two rooms in Christina Street with a ‘Malayan landlord, Kaddi, and another young family headed by a seafarer named Limbo who practised becoming a jazz trombonist in between trips’. Then there’s Gillian Clarke and memories of wartime BBC Wales and Cardiff’s contemporary multiculturalism described by a Welsh-speaking North Walian poet, Graham Davies, who now lives in the capital. Stella Schiller Levy produces a moving portrait of a Jewish childhood during the war. These stories make you look at the city again. It’s as if the reader undertakes the same journey as John Williams who, as an eighteen-year-old, middle-class boy brought up in ‘a genteel Cardiff’, returned to Cardiff from the heady excitements of London to discover an ‘across the tracks Cardiff’ - not only that of the Docks but also of the working-class communities of Roath and Splott. Telling the lost, half-remembered stories: this is how legends are made – stories which burgeon and mutate into fascination and John Williams does this even though he’s quite clear his sojourn ‘was the most miserable year of my life’. The collection closes beautifully with the chaotic crescendo that is Robson’s eager rush of street talk. Robson’s is a modern voice, moving out of the shadows to take you to a ‘good place’: he celebrates the ‘triangle’ of ‘roath splott adamsdown. not a triangle renowned for its miracles not a triangle at all’ and defines his home city as ‘everything you make of it & less & more. move it in & ship it out. this home patch this scrag of life this capital this potential this delicate fanning of the flames gimme a match so watch out smart arse it’s all coming back . . . cardiff as rumbling creative stove & store? too fuckin right. take me back.’ Collections like this make you fall in love with a newly strange familiar city, give it back its lost partial histories, so it’s not just the place with the new stadium, not just the place of a minor level governing body. A real pleasure. Buy it! Give it to friends!