Cardiff’s civic centre in Cathays Park, described as the finest civic centre in the British Isles, is an impressive planned group of public buildings, begun largely with wealth created by the coal industry in the south Wales coalfield. This book covers the Cardiff site’s earlier evolution as a private park in the nineteenth century by the fabulously rich Bute family, and the borough’s battles to obtain land for public buildings and the park’s development in the twentieth century, to become Britain’s finest civic centre. All the buildings, memorials and statues in the park are fully described and illustrated in this book which includes maps, plans and photographs. The History and Architecture of Cardiff Civic Centre is the first in the series Architecture of Wales, published in partnership with the Royal Society of Architects in Wales.
Cardiff’s civic centre in Cathays Park, described as the finest civic centre in the British Isles, is an impressive planned group of public buildings, begun largely with wealth created by the coal industry in the south Wales coalfield. This book covers the Cardiff site’s earlier evolution as a private park in the nineteenth century by the fabulously rich Bute family, and the borough’s battles to obtain land for public buildings and the park’s development in the twentieth century, to become Britain’s finest civic centre. All the buildings, memorials and statues in the park are fully described and illustrated in this book which includes maps, plans and photographs. The History and Architecture of Cardiff Civic Centre is the first in the series Architecture of Wales, published in partnership with the Royal Society of Architects in Wales.
The History and Architecture of Cardiff Civic Centre: Black Gold, White City
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Overview
Cardiff’s civic centre in Cathays Park, described as the finest civic centre in the British Isles, is an impressive planned group of public buildings, begun largely with wealth created by the coal industry in the south Wales coalfield. This book covers the Cardiff site’s earlier evolution as a private park in the nineteenth century by the fabulously rich Bute family, and the borough’s battles to obtain land for public buildings and the park’s development in the twentieth century, to become Britain’s finest civic centre. All the buildings, memorials and statues in the park are fully described and illustrated in this book which includes maps, plans and photographs. The History and Architecture of Cardiff Civic Centre is the first in the series Architecture of Wales, published in partnership with the Royal Society of Architects in Wales.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783168446 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 05/20/2016 |
| Series: | Architecture of Wales |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 20 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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The History and Architecture of Cardiff Civic Centre
Black Gold, White City
By John B. Hilling
University of Wales Press
Copyright © 2016 John B. HillingAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78316-844-6
CHAPTER 1
A SMALL, SLEEPY TOWN IN THE SHADOW OF A CASTLE
Cardiff lies low', William Gilpin wrote while on a tour of southern Wales during the latter part of the eighteenth century, 'though it is not unpleasantly seated on the land side among woody hills. As we approached, it appeared with more of the furniture of antiquity about it than any town we had seen in Wales ... From the town and parts adjacent, the windings and approach of the river Taff from the sea, with the full tide, make a grand appearance. This is, on the whole, the finest estuary we have seen in Wales'.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century little had apparently changed and, to the casual observer, Cardiff would seem to be nothing more than a small, sleepy market town in the shadow of a medieval castle. Indeed, there was scarcely anything that might indicate how the place would develop and prosper during the remainder of the century. In fact, any evidence of progress was so unpromising that when the antiquary Benjamin Malkin visited the town in 1803 he observed that 'Cardiff is the capital of Glamorganshire, though far from the first of its towns in extent and population.' Then, in mocking vein, he remarked that 'the requisitions of the Welsh are so moderate, that they consider this as a neat and agreeable place, though it has little contrivance to boast in the arrangement of its streets, little of accommodation or symmetry in the construction of its buildings'.
Nevertheless, despite his snub, Malkin was able to note, in his book The Scenery, Antiquities and Biography of South Wales, that there was 'a very good canal, which establishes [Cardiff] as the connecting link between the great iron works of Merthyr Tydvil and the English markets'. The canal and the town's fortunate geographic position even led Malkin to speculate about the town's future. He wrote:
Cardiff is capable of much greater improvements in a commercial point of view, than are yet contemplated by the inhabitants, notwithstanding the successful example of its neighbours. Pennarth harbour, below the town, is the best and safest in the Bristol Channel ... When it is considered that by the canal Cardiff might be easily, abundantly, and cheaply supplied with coal from the collieries, and iron from Merthyr Tydvil, for carrying on the hardware manufactories; with tin-plate also from the largest tin mills in the kingdom, on the banks of the canal; with copper and brass by water from Swansea, Neath and other establishments in the western part of the county; it is difficult to ascribe a limit to the commercial capabilities of this place. Cardiff is situated in as plentiful a country as any in the kingdom for all kinds of provisions; and having so good a harbour for the largest shipping, could easily export its produce and manufactures ... to any part of the world. Cardiff ... possesses all the advantages of nature that can in this respect be conceived, and those on the largest scale.
Malkin's perceptive views of the town's possible future were, in the end, largely realised, although not entirely in the way that he had envisaged nor during his own lifetime.
When Benjamin Malkin visited Cardiff in 1803, the canal that he had referred to was already 9 years old, and the historic inauguration of the world's first steam railway locomotive a few miles to the north of Cardiff was just a year away. Although the full consequences of these two events could hardly have been envisaged at the time, the opening of the Glamorganshire Canal in 1794 and the trial run of Trevithick's steam locomotive at Penydarren in 1804 were significant occasions signalling, as they did, a period of unprecedented change for Cardiff and the Glamorgan valleys. While it was Trevithick's locomotive that was eventually to have the greatest consequences, initially it was the opening of the Glamorganshire Canal that set in motion Cardiff's extraordinary transition from sleepy market town to capital city.
Cardiff had hardly altered during the two preceding centuries before the coming of the canal and, where there had been change, it had not necessarily been for the better. The town's T-shaped layout, with development blocked off on the north side by the Castle and the Herbert House, was virtually the same as that depicted in 1610 by John Speed in his atlas (Pl. 1). The town consisted of two main streets (Crockerton and High Street/St Mary Street) at right-angles to each other, together with some lesser streets (Church Street, St John Street, Womanby Street) and a number of connecting lanes. Even at this date, there appears to have been a decline from the town's probable thirteenth-century peak of about 2,000 people. Additionally, as Speed recorded, 'as the Taue [Taff] is a friend to the towne, in making a Key [Quay] for arrivage of shipping; so is she a foe to S. Maries Church in the South, with undermining her foundations, and threatning her fall'. During the next half century the population continued to decline, falling to about 1,500 by 1670. A few years later St Mary's Church was roofless and its tower had fallen, leaving the town with only one church.
It was not until 1747 that a new Town Hall (Pl. 2), comprising a council room above a market hall and prison, had been built in the High Street to replace a ruinous medieval Guild Hall, and not until 1774 that a private Act had been passed 'for the paving, cleansing and lighting of the streets of Cardiff'. William Rees noted – and Sandby's 1776 watercolour of Crockerton confirms – that 'even late into the eighteenth century, many burgesses ... continued to have, on their town plots, cowhouses, stables and pig-sties to house their animals and poultry, the cows passing daily through the streets on their way to and from the town fields' (Pl. 3).
Progress continued to be slow, however, and another seven years were to pass before any of the old town gates were removed: first, the east and west gates were taken down in 1781, and then the north gate in 1785. Meanwhile the Corporation had repaired and improved the Town Quay mentioned by Speed and, by 1788, there were three private wharves in operation. Together, the wharves dealt with a growing maritime trade much of which was concerned with iron brought down from the ironworks (Cyfarthfa, Dowlais, Penydarren and Plymouth) at Merthyr Tydfil (Pl. 4). But transporting iron from Merthyr was a slow and laborious business, involving either teams of horses or mules along mountain tracks or horse-drawn wagons along a turnpike road in the Taff valley. Soon neither the animals nor the wharves were able to keep pace with the demand for iron exports and so, in 1790, a private Bill was obtained by the ironmasters – with the support of Lord Bute, who owned much of the land in Cardiff through which the canal would pass – that provided 'for making and maintaining a Navigable Canal from Merthyr Tidvile [sic], to and through a Place called The Bank, near the Town of Cardiff' (Fig. 1.1).
Construction of the Glamorganshire Canal began at the Merthyr Tydfil end in August 1790 and work continued more or less steadily until the canal, which was 25 miles (40 km) long, reached the outskirts of Cardiff. From there it passed through lands of the Bute estate (Pl. 5) and along the line of Cardiff Castle's moat – where the towpath was obligingly laid on the bank opposite to that of the castle – through a tunnel under Crockerton and then alongside what remained of the town walls and town ditch until it reached the River Taff. On 10 February, 1794, the canal was finally opened for traffic. John Bird, writing in The Gentleman's Magazine reported that 'the canal from Cardiff to Merthir-Tidvil [sic] is completed and a fleet of canal boats have arrived at Cardiff laden with the products of the iron-works there, to the great joy of the whole town'. Two years later the canal was extended half a mile downstream to the mouth of the Taff, where a sea-lock was built. Later, a branch of the canal was constructed as far as Aberdare and opened in 1812 to serve the ironworks in that area.
After the coming of the canal all was to change in Cardiff as the town became the outlet for exporting an ever-increasing tonnage of iron that had been processed at various ironworks in the valleys of east Glamorgan. This was soon to result in its becoming Britain's major iron-exporting port. The surge in iron exports was helped by the growing need for weaponry during the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815). According to Bird's Directory and Guide to Cardiff in 1796, 'not less than 8,780 tons of cast and wrought iron of the best manufacture [is] shipped annually for London and other places; the bulk of which is made in Merthyr Tydvil, and which is now brought down from thence by a curious navigable canal'. Although the borough's population had risen again to 1,870 inhabitants by the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was still considerably less than either Merthyr Tydfil (7,704 people) or Swansea (6,831 people). Moreover, with only 314 inhabited houses in 1801 there appeared to be fewer households in Cardiff than there had been a 130 years earlier when recorded in the hearth tax roll.
Within a few years of the canal's opening an attempt was made to link Cardiff with Merthyr Tydfil by rail. A Bill for the construction of a tram-road from Cardiff to Carno in the Rhymney Valley, with branches to Merthyr and Aberdare, was first presented to Parliament as early as 1799 by Samuel Hornfray of the Penydarren Ironworks. Objections were raised by rival parties and the full scheme was unable go ahead. Instead, a shorter length of tramroad, nearly 10 miles (16 km) long, was laid in 1802 between Penydarren and the canal basin at Navigation, better known now as Abercynon. Homfray, keen to be at the forefront of affairs, commissioned Richard Trevithick to build a steam locomotive for the tram-road. The trial run of Trevithick's 'high pressure tram engine' – the world's first steam locomotive to run on rails – took place in February 1804. Hauling a train of wagons with 10 ton of iron and 70 passengers, it made a successful journey down to Abercynon at a rate of 5 miles (8 km) per hour. The Cambrian newspaper reported the historic journey, noting: 'It is not doubted but that ... the machine in the hands of the present proprietors, will be made use of in a thousand instances never yet thought of for an engine.' Unfortunately, the engine's weight broke some of the brittle cast-iron plate rails and the engine was unable to complete the return journey to Merthyr. Two more runs were made with a 10-ton load before the project was abandoned. Even so, the trial had demonstrated the potential for steam locomotive power, a power that was to be successfully used by the Taff Vale Railway, 36 years later.
Although the tram-road had fulfilled its original object of conveying iron to the canal at Abercynon, it was the canal itself that was the means of bringing the raw material down to Cardiff. By 1817, despite a depression following the Napoleonic Wars, almost 30,000 ton of iron a year was exported from Cardiff; by 1830 this had risen to 66,000 ton, and by 1839 to 132,781 ton.
The town's population continued to grow in tandem with the prospering iron trade, gradually gaining momentum from a roughly 3 per cent increase per year during the first decade of the nineteenth century to more than 7 per cent per year by the third decade, until it had reached a total of 6,187 people by 1831. Meanwhile, there had been a development that was to have a crucial and long-lasting effect on the town's later growth. This was the acquisition between 1780 and 1814 of large areas of land in and around the borough by the fourth Earl (later first Marquess) of Bute. Starting from a comparatively small base the Earl had, 'by making substantial purchases of strategic land at Cardiff and within the [south Wales] coalfield ... considerably enhanced the position of his family in east Glamorgan'. It was this 'enhanced position' that allowed the Butes to dictate the way in which the town would develop over the next century. Resolute land acquisition by the estate naturally created a certain amount of ill-feeling locally. There were even rumours that Lord Bute intended to divert traffic from the turnpike road (to Merthyr Tydfil) in order to bring his Cathays property – or Cathays Park as it would come to be known – into a closer relationship with the Castle estate. But, as often with rumours, there were few grounds with which to substantiate the gossip. It is ironic, nevertheless, 'that the land preservation and wealth that led to the creation of one of the best civic centres in Britain was the consequence of the creation of one of the worst, the scars of industrialisation on the coalfield'.
From the 1820s coal became an increasingly important export (mostly coastwise) from Cardiff, and by 1830 coal exports exceeded iron exports in weight for the first time. Coal, however, being bulkier than iron was less valuable per ton, and it was to be another 20 years or so before the value of coal exported actually exceeded that of iron. The growing use of the canal for transporting iron and coal down to Cardiff soon led to serious congestion at the canal Basin, which was situated between the town and the sea-lock. In order to improve the situation the canal company proposed widening and deepening the Basin, but the proposal came to nothing as it involved land belonging to the second Marquess of Bute, who opposed the scheme, saying that it 'may defeat a very important plan that has been suggested to [me] to improve [my own] property in Cardiff'. Quite what was intended by Bute at this stage is not clear for a number of schemes were in the air, including a canal through Cathays Park (see Chapter 3).
In the end it was a scheme for a new dock that was realised. The project, which had started off in 1828 as a mile-and-a-half long ship canal designed by James Green to be built in the marshlands south of the town, and been revised by Thomas Telford the following year, received parliamentary approval in 1830. Then, after much discussion of alternatives, an amending Act was obtained in 1834 for a 19-acre (8 ha) dock. This was eventually built between 1837 and 1839 and became known as the Bute West Dock (Pl. 6). Long and narrow, the dock was an ambitious project and probably larger than was strictly necessary at that time. Trade at the new dock was, at first, sluggish as the canal that fed it was unable to deal with the growing levels of iron and coal that required to be transported. It was not until the next great venture – the Taff Vale Railway – had been brought into service that the new dock's prosperity was assured and Cardiff was able to take a lead over other ports in the area. Nevertheless, the initiative of Bute had been crucial in establishing Cardiff as the largest port and town on the south Wales coast; the subsequent history of the town followed on from this.
CHAPTER 2BLACK GOLD
The idea of linking Cardiff and Merthyr Tydfil by rail was not, as we have seen, a new one. However, the railway proposed by three of the Merthyr ironmasters in 1834 – in an effort to overcome the inability of the Glamorganshire Canal to cope with the growing traffic in iron and coal – was on an altogether different scale to the Penydarren Tramroad that had been laid more than 30 years earlier. The Canal Company tried to oppose the scheme, but the railway (now known as The Taff Vale Railway) received Royal Assent in June 1836, though only with the proviso that the maximum speed on the line should be no more than 12 miles (19 km) per hour. The railway, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel to run parallel to the Taff river, opened for goods and passenger traffic between Cardiff and Navigation (Abercynon) in October 1840. Six months later it was continued up the valley to Merthyr Tydfil, crossing the Penydarren Tramroad on its way (Pl. 7). Branch lines were later added to Aberdare (1846), Dowlais (1848) and Dinas (1849) (Fig. 2.1).
As with the Bute West Dock, the railway was slow to pick up traffic in its early days. Part of the problem had been the second Marquess of Bute, who had objected to any scheme for the new line to unload its cargoes at anywhere other than his new dock. Eventually agreement was reached between the two parties, although it was not until 1848 that the railway was extended to the Bute West Dock. Soon afterwards, coal exports from Cardiff began to take off, rising from a total of 157,733 ton in 1841 to 744,193 ton a decade later. As trade at Bute's new dock began to exceed trade at the canal sea-lock, the Taff Vale Railway became profitable and was soon on its way to becoming one of the most prosperous railways in Britain. During the next decade the Taff Vale Railway Company extended its network into the Rhondda Fawr and Rhondda Fach valleys, opening as far as both Ferndale and Treherbert in 1856. The impact of the railways on the rise of Cardiff's coal trade, and consequent growth, was phenomenal and 'difficult to overestimate'. In 1840 Cardiff lagged well behind both Newport and Swansea in coal exports, but by 1874 the port was exporting three-and-a-half times as much coal as Newport and almost five times as much as Swansea.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The History and Architecture of Cardiff Civic Centre by John B. Hilling. Copyright © 2016 John B. Hilling. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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