Cardiff

Arcades, Records and the Market

In Morgan Arcade, at number 27, there is a record shop called Spillers. It was founded in 1894, when Henry Spiller sold phonographs, wax cylinders and shellac out of the now-demolished Queens Arcade, which makes it the oldest record shop in the world. It has moved twice since — to Morgan Arcade in 2010, to its current spot in 2015 — but it is still selling records in a city that has more surviving Victorian and Edwardian arcades than anywhere else in Britain. There are roughly seven of them, most over 150 years old. Cardiff calls itself the City of Arcades and, for once, the nickname is just a description.

The arcades are the best way to understand the centre, because the centre is small and you can walk all of it. Castle Arcade has a split-level balcony. Morgan Arcade is the best-preserved, with first-floor Venetian windows and original wooden shopfronts, and there are more — Royal, High Street, Wyndham, Duke Street. In the Royal Arcade you will find Wally's Delicatessen, which has been there a long time and runs whisky tastings. The whole core of the city — the castle, the arcades, Central Market, the Principality Stadium, the shops on Queen Street and St Mary Street — sits within a few minutes' walk of everything else, and Cardiff Central and Queen Street stations are both here, so a stay in the centre needs no car.

Central Market is the other thing to see indoors. It opened in May 1891, designed by the Borough Surveyor William Harpur, on the site of the old town jail — the gallows stood where the St Mary Street entrance is now. Ashton's have sold fish here since 1866, from the Trinity Street entrance; in 2012 they made the papers by selling meat from a 20-foot thresher shark that weighed 550lb. Up on the balcony is Kelly's Records, which Eddie and Phyllis Kelly started as a stall in 1969 and which is still there. Go to the Market Deli for a Clark's Pie — the oval short-crust one, the Original made with minced beef, potato and gravy. It is the pie Cardiff argues about, and it is worth arguing about.

A City of Welsh Flavours

If you want to eat properly, the food is spread across the neighbourhoods, and Pontcanna holds the densest cluster of it. Pontcanna is leafy Victorian and Edwardian terraces on tree-lined streets, a half-hour walk from the centre or a short bus ride, backing onto Pontcanna Fields and Bute Park. It has been called one of the trendiest places to live in the UK, and it is quiet at night in the way residential streets are quiet. It is also where Cardiff got its first Michelin star. Gorse opened in May 2024 and had the star in less than a year, working out of a room with just 22 covers around a fully open kitchen. The kitchen sends out fresh Parker House rolls, a caramelly Welsh kelp custard with caviar, and a cannelé made with whisky from the Penderyn distillery up in Bannau Brycheinog. A few doors into the same district you have Heaney's, where Tommy Heaney cooks modern Welsh food around seasonal produce, and Thomas by Tom Simmons, doing Welsh-French fine dining with a tasting menu around £85 — roasted monkfish, Creedy Carver duck breast. For brunch there is Milkwood, which calls itself an independent modern Welsh bistro and turns to small plates and cocktails on Friday and Saturday.

In the centre, Pasture is the steakhouse people mean when they say steakhouse — an open kitchen, a charcoal grill, aged steak as the point of the exercise, with generous sides. The Potted Pig does modern British in a former bank vault beneath St Mary Street, which is exactly the sort of room a bank vault makes. Out west along Cowbridge Road you have Hiraeth for Welsh cooking and Summer Palace, an authentic Chinese kitchen going since 1988 in a building said to be medieval — parts of it dated to the 15th century.

Beyond the restaurants there is a whole layer of Welsh food to chase down: bara brith, the spiced fruit loaf made with tea; Welsh cakes griddled fresh at Fabulous Welshcakes and Bakestones; Welsh rarebit with cider or beer at The Welsh House. None of it is hard to find.

Pubs, the Bay and Green Space

The pubs sort themselves by what you want from an evening. The City Arms on Quay Street is the match-day pub, right beside the stadium, built in the 1880s as the Cattle Market Tavern, then the Dovers Arms, then the City Arms from 1905, and reputed to be haunted by a poltergeist. It keeps a rotating cask and craft range. On Westgate Street, Tiny Rebel is the city home of the Newport brewery of the same name — all craft, pub grub, themed nights. The Goat Major sits opposite the castle on High Street, oak-panelled, pouring Brains SA, which the regulars call Skull Attack, and doing a pie menu; it is an old-Cardiff boozer and makes no apology for it. The Vulcan Lounge on Wyvern Road is the budget one students favour, with big breakfasts, giant pizzas and live music. Down in Cardiff Bay, The Mount Stuart is a large Wetherspoon on the waterfront with bay views, named for the Bute family whose seat is Mount Stuart.

The Bay is the other place to stay, and it feels newer and more spread out than the centre. It is the regenerated docklands: Mermaid Quay has more than thirty waterfront places to eat, and around them are the Wales Millennium Centre, the Senedd and Techniquest. It connects to the centre by the short branch line to Cardiff Bay station or a 40-minute walk along the water. The Millennium Centre, which opened in November 2004, has a line of poetry cut into its front in letters over two metres high — Gwyneth Lewis's words, "creu gwir fel gwydr o ffwrnais awen / in these stones horizons sing." The Senedd next to it, the Welsh Parliament, was designed by Richard Rogers and opened on St David's Day 2006: a slate plinth, a sweeping timber roof, glass walls, and a public gallery above the debating chamber so you can watch from over the top. Techniquest is the hands-on science centre, over a hundred exhibits including a giant walk-on piano, family stuff from about £10. And by Mermaid Quay is Ianto's Shrine, a fan memorial to a character from Torchwood, which was filmed here; it has drawn tributes since the character died on screen in 2009, and the actor still visits.

Whichever base you pick, the green space is close. Behind the castle, Bute Park runs 138 acres of landscaped parkland and arboretum along the River Taff, with more than 2,000 catalogued trees including several national Champion Trees — the largest of their species in the country. West of it, Sophia Gardens holds the Glamorgan county cricket ground, a Test venue. North-east, in Roath, is Roath Park, one of the finest late-Victorian parks in Britain, with a 30-acre boating lake and, standing in the lake, the Scott Memorial Lighthouse from 1915. It honours Captain Scott, whose Antarctic expedition sailed from Cardiff in 1910 aboard the Terra Nova; the lighthouse holds a scale model of the ship. If you want to keep walking, the Taff Trail runs 55 miles from Cardiff Bay all the way to Brecon, following the river through parks, woodland and the leftovers of the valley industry.

Castle Walls and Coal Wealth

Cardiff Castle is the thing everyone comes for, and it earns it. There has been occupation on the site since a Roman fort of the first century AD; the Norman keep sits on its motte in the middle. But the interiors are Victorian — between 1865 and 1881 the architect William Burges rebuilt the place for John Crichton-Stuart, the 3rd Marquess of Bute, who had converted to Catholicism at 21 and inherited a fortune said to make him the richest man in the world, all of it out of Cardiff coal. Bute himself was unimpressed with what he started with: "I am painfully alive to the fact that the castle is very far indeed from setting anything like an example in art." Along the wall by Bute Park runs Burges's Animal Wall — fourteen sculpted animals, the first nine carved by his favourite sculptor Thomas Nicholls in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The wall was moved about 50 metres from the castle into the park in 1922 to widen the road.

That coal is the whole story of the place. Cardiff had under 7,000 people in 1800 and 170,000 by 1900, the fastest-growing town in Wales. It exported 2 million tons of coal in 1862 and 10,700,000 tons by 1913, for a time handling more coal than any port on earth. The Coal Exchange, built in the 1880s, was where merchants fixed the world price, and it is the reputed site of the world's first million-pound cheque, around 1909; it is a hotel now. The exports stopped in 1964. And Cardiff was only made capital of Wales on 20 December 1955, when the Home Secretary Gwilym Lloyd George told the Commons the government would treat it as such and added, drily, "no formal measures are necessary to give effect to this decision." It is one of the smallest capitals in Europe.

Llandaff, St Fagans and Tiger Bay

Two things are worth the short trip out. Llandaff Cathedral stands on one of the oldest Christian sites in Britain, founded in the 6th century, with a cathedral on it since around 1120. A parachute mine took the roof off the nave during the Cardiff Blitz in January 1941; the restoration reopened in 1958, and the thing you remember is Jacob Epstein's 16-foot aluminium Christ in Majesty, floating on a concrete arch straight across the nave. Llandaff was its own tiny village until Cardiff absorbed it in 1922, and it still feels like one. Five miles west is St Fagans, the free open-air Museum of History, more than fifty buildings reassembled from across Wales — farmhouses, chapels, shops. Among them now is the Vulcan Hotel, an 1853 dockworkers' pub from Adamsdown, taken down brick by brick in 2012 and rebuilt here, reopening in May 2024: a working pub turned museum piece, which is a strange fate for a pub and somehow the right one.

Shirley Bassey was born in 1937 on Adeline Street in Tiger Bay, the old multi-ethnic dockland where they said you could hear Greek, Arabic, Chinese, African, Irish and French on Bute Street inside a single hour. Most of the original streets went in the 1960s clearances. She still sings about it — "The Girl from Tiger Bay."