Real Cardiff
An Article
taken from Real Cardiff by Peter finch published by Seren Books
http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/roath.htm
I'm walking through Roath, the classic worker's
town. Its meshed terraces spread east from the industrial city.
Roath originally stretched the whole way from the Crockerton East
Gate to the Rumney River. Rath. Raz. The name has a hard,
pre-British sound. There's a theory, which I like enormously, that
the city should never have been called Cardiff in the first place.
Its original name was Roath. Ptolemy , the early Egyptian
mathematician and geographer who compiled the first world maps from
the gossip of itinerant mariners, has a place called Rathostathibios,
scratched in on the papyrus, next to the Taff more or less where
Cardiff Castle came to stand. Say that word a few times.
Rathostathibios. You can make it sound like Roath. Like Taff.
Rāth-Tāv. Y Rhāth. Roth. Rov Roath. Roath on the Taff taking in
everything from the Ely to the Rumney. When the country came to be
divided into parishes Cardiff, by then already a burgh, became the
name for the western half and Roath for the east. The division was
matter of administrative convenience, no more than that. The Cardiff
half, with its Castle, its quay and its navigable river grew in
importance. Roath, with its hillfort-sited church, mill and manor
house, remained a village. Until the nineteenth century, that is,
when Bute's industrial expansion filled the fields between the two
places with tenements and streets. Roath, capital of Wales. Could
well have been.
Where Roath begins and ends today is a matter
for dispute. Parts of its southern extremity have been taken over by
Adamsdown, Splott, Atlantic Wharf, Tremorfa, and Pengam Green. To
the north Cathays, Penylan, Waterloo, and Plasnewydd all encroach.
I've always lived in Roath. When I was a child we seemed to move
every couple of years as part of some financial management scheme of
my father's. He theorised that if you bought and sold judiciously
you could make enough spare to get by on. Not that his schemes ever
appeared to actually generate much cash. We went from Kimberly Road
to Waterloo Gardens to Ty Draw Place to Westville Road. Always
Cardiff east which my mother insisted that I either call Penylan or
Roath Park, depending on which house we happened to be in at the
time. It was the same for our brief sojourn in Canton. When we were
there I had to put Victoria Park down as the district. In later life
she actually did move to Penylan although her letters then labelled
the place as Lakeside. God knows what would have happened if she'd
made it to Lisvane. She probably wouldn't have regarded that as
Cardiff at all.
The main highway east is Newport Road. This
lorry-choked artery passes through the site of the Roath Court manor
house's gatehouse, past Cardiff's best old style Brains pub, The
Royal Oak, with its second floor boxing gym, its rock music backroom
and its heavy-booted regulars, and out onto what was once the
causeway. The flatland between here and the eastern rise of Rumney
Hill was (and still is if you peer between the tarmac) bogland.
These are the great eastern salt marshes which, before the building
of the seawall, were regularly inundated at high tide. Here was an
almost East Anglian landscape of reed, fishing henge, and drainage
gully. Salmon. Shrimp. Crab. Grass. Bladder-wrack. Today it's
shopping mall territory. Supermarkets, Drive-in Burger Bars,
bathroom warehouses, office supplies, curtains, pots with
butterflies painted on their sides, fitted kitchens, basket-weave
dining suites, emulsion paint, wooden garden ornaments, drill bits
that cost £1 a dozen but snap as soon as you put them anywhere near
a wall. Newport Road blazes out along the line of the ancient
Portway , the Roman Road that ran from Isca to Nidum, Caerleon to
Neath. It's been here a while, this route.
To the south the streets of Splott and Tremorfa
are hampered by a dense corrugation of speed humps that slow even
the Kawasakis that leap across them. Road deaths in poorer districts
were long thought to be the fault of addled youth spinning sparks
out of the road surface in their side-skirted, sewer-piped Peugeots
and speaker-stuffed Novas. Research has shown that they are more a
product of the amount time people here actually spend on the streets
and the number they need to cross in order to get where they are
going. Still, nothing quite like seeing a gleaming boy racer
fingering his earring as he boomboxes along at a five mph crawl. On
the causeway - the A4161 - it's a different matter. Six lanes of
solid diesel doing fifty make the proposition of walking to get
anywhere terminally daunting. America has landed among the carpet
superstores. You don't like this Berber twist? Drive next door to
see theirs.
I walk it anyway, sidestepping through low
parking-bay walls and between the massed transport of south Wales'
Sunday shoppers. The flat I used to rent in the last south-side
terrace block of Edwardian three-stories has now been refashioned as
Dijabrindab Eerwidja, an Asian grand residence next to where the
brick works used to be. At pub chuck out you could once hear Twist &
Shout roaring passed, up along Newport Road and over towards the
Harlequins. C'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon. A song you could always sing in
Cardiff when you were drunk. I began my writing career here. Tried
it as a singer with a guitar, harmonica harness, bottle caps on my
shoes, the whole bit. I did out of tune, self-penned folk songs.
Drizzle-drenched Bob Dylan. South Wales Donovan. I was terrible. I
toured the pubs. This is what folk singers did, I'd heard. Got in
the bar, scraped, clanged. I got thrown out of everywhere. Even the
scrumpy drunks in the Greyhound couldn't cope. Cun you do Nelliedean?
Well sodoffthen. So I went back to the flat and turned my awful
songs into awful poems. Time improved them. I think. I wrote Welsh
Wordscape there, pissed off with Wales' self-referential tie-wearing
conservatism. Where was the future? Somewhere else.
Roath peters out at the Rumney where the Lleici outfalls and the once coracle-fished waters swirl dirtily into the Severn. This is the border. Indifferently the land rises. Roath behind it. Capital of Wales. Roath - the town that floats.