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Cardiff: The Making and Development of the Capital City of Wales


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Cardiff: The Making and Development of the Capital City of Wales

Cardiff: The Making and Development of the Capital City of Wales

Cardiff: The Making and Development of the Capital City of Wales Martin Johnes Swansea University In 1905 Cardiff was made a city. It was recognition of the town’s staggering growth in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and its emergence as one of Britain’s most important commercial centres. But Cardiff also married cityhood with a belief that it was the ‘Welsh metropolis’, Wales’ leading urban centre. This was only too evident at the grand new civic centre which included a City Hall with a Red Dragon perched proudly on its dome and a marble gallery of Welsh heroes in its hall.1 The civic centre may have made Cardiff look like a capital but the idea of the city as the Welsh metropolis, let alone the formal capital of Wales that title implied, was far from universally accepted. Cardiff was an economic focal point for south-east Wales but there were profound social differences between the port and the coal-producing districts to its north before 1945. The metropolis owed its prosperity to those valleys but the people there were looked down upon as folk from ‘the hills’.2 Those folk themselves were distrustful of the city’s pretensions and its tradition of voting Conservative. Meanwhile, to the north and west of Wales, Cardiff was a remote place with no direct political, social or economic importance. Nor was the city at the centre of a communications network that united the whole of Wales and Liverpool provided a more accessible and natural focal point for those in the north. Moreover, the lack of any political apparatus of nationhood in Wales meant that Cardiff was also denied the opportunity to house the kind of institutions that might lend credence to claims to be the Welsh metropolis. Wales did develop national cultural institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A National Museum was located in Cardiff but the National Library was put in Aberystwyth.3 More popular cultural institutions, such as sporting internationals and the national eisteddfod, were rotated around the country. Cardiff’s elite may have resented the placing of the National Library in a 1 westerly wilderness but elsewhere the city was simply not deemed to have any right to national institutions.4 Adding to the uncertainty of Cardiff’s claim to be capital were doubts about the city’s Welshness. In 1901 just 8.1 percent of its population spoke Welsh, compared with 49.9 percent in Wales as a whole. Cardiff shared in neither the Welsh- speaking culture of rural Wales nor the socialist traditions of valleys Wales. Instead, it was part of what Sir Alfred Zimmern termed in 1921 ‘British Wales’, geographically part of Wales but culturally Anglicised. Welsh-speaking families in Cardiff could thus feel aliens in their own country. One man even remembers being slapped by a stranger in the street for speaking Welsh to his brother.5 W. J. Gruffydd, a Professor of Welsh, typified the views of the Welsh-speaking establishment in the early twentieth century when he claimed that ‘every Welshman living in Cardiff or its suburbs is an exile’.6 Thus, despite Cardiff’s economic importance to south Wales, the city lacked the economic, cultural or political characteristics that might have lent credence to the idea of it as the Welsh capital. This was as much a reflection on how young and underdeveloped Wales was as a modern nation as it was on Cardiff as a city. Conquest by England preceded the evolution of urbanization and the industrial nation and thus by the time urban centres began to emerge in Wales London was already well established as the centre of political power for the Welsh. Yet capital cities are by no means static entities. As one planning historian has argued, they are participants in and expressions of ‘broader historical forces’.7 Cardiff’s claim, attainment and development as the Welsh capital city are clear illustrations of this. They demonstrate first the uncertainty and contested nature of Welsh identity and then the growing confidence that came to exist in Wales as the nation became a more meaningful administrative entity. That process might have reduced any dispute surrounding Cardiff’s capital status but it did not always endear the capital to the rest of Wales. There is little writing on the history of capital cities as capital cities and even less on the capitals of stateless nations.8 Yet a consideration of the evolution of Cardiff’s capital status offers important insights into how capitals operate. Across the globe, capitals have attempted to use the built environment to symbolize state and nationhood. However, since the political context that these physical symbols of capital status are supposed to represent is constantly evolving, it is very difficult for 2 those symbols to be particularly meaningful.9 The status and meaning of capitals is thus not static and should be considered over time rather than through snapshot descriptions. When that is done a more complex picture emerges than any simple celebration of civic symbolism suggests. Capitals need to enjoy a popular legitimacy, both amongst their own citizens and those of the wider nation, before buildings and civic space can have an impact. As with the capitals of the European Union, capital status in Wales had to develop from below, slowly gaining in legitimacy as Wales itself became accepted as part of the experience and horizons of daily life. Thus any history of capitals has to extend beyond considering the built environment that has dominated its limited historiography and root itself in an understanding of popular attitudes and local political processes. Only then can the reality of being a capital be properly understood. Declaring a capital In 1924 the Cardiff-based the South Wales Daily News decided to ballot local authorities on the question of a Welsh capital. 161 authorities were in favour of Wales having a capital, with just 21 wanting no action taken. However, there was far less agreement over where that capital should be. Seventy-six authorities voted for Cardiff, 42 for Caernarfon, 14 for Aberystwyth, 8 for Swansea and 20 for other towns.10 That inconclusive result put the idea on the hold until 1945 when a request from Cardiff, driven probably as much by civic boosterism as national pride, that the city be recognized as the Welsh capital was rejected by the government on the basis there was no unanimity on the issue. The Western Mail thought the prime minister had been advised not to interfere for fear of harming Labour’s prospects in north Wales.11 The issue was raised again in 1948 by the Cardiff Cymmrodorion Society, a body which promoted Welsh interests. This led the council, eager to boost its own stature, to petition the Home Office for a declaration of Cardiff as capital. It supported its claims with an eighteen-page document that revealed how contemporary understandings of what a capital was were multifaceted. As well as highlighting a civic centre that looked like it belonged to a capital, the petition celebrated the city’s economic, cultural and civic importance and staked a (dubious) claim that Cardiff ‘had been a seat of administrative government in Wales for centuries.’ It was on firmer ground when it claimed that the city was the home of ‘virtually all government departments, national institutions and administrative services for Wales.’12 The 3 Welsh BBC was based in Cardiff but the wider reality was that government was then little devolved and even the infrastructure of the new regional agencies set up by Attlee’s government to administer its planned state and nationalized industries were not always based on Wales, let alone south Wales. With Caernarfon also claiming the title, the petition got nowhere. Instead, Cardiff was left clinging to the idea that it was the ‘unofficial capital’.13 In 1950, Cardiff’s Lord Mayor of Cardiff, persuaded the Council for Wales and Monmouthshire, a body set up by the government to advise on Welsh policy, to consider the issue. The Council invited applications which it received from Cardiff, Caernarfon and Aberystwyth and Llandrindod Wells. After completing its review, it concluded there was widespread support for and pride in Cardiff, even in north Wales. Caernarfon was unimpressed and its town clerk wrote to the Council saying the town ‘stands supreme as a living symbol of all that is best in the Welsh way of life’.14 The Council had based its considerations on population, physical extent and financial capacity and it argued that a capital should have the economic and cultural strength and civic experience to ‘furnish the material and moral resources of leadership’. As might be expected of a body that supported administrative devolution, much of its argument lay in the potential of Cardiff to develop into a governmental capital rather than the actuality of the then situation. But the Council also noted that a capital had to be substantially representative of the culture and industry of the nation. Here Cardiff’s claim was weaker and again the Prime Minister announced he would not recommend anything because of the lack of agreement on the matter.15 In looking at how to proceed the city’s claim, the more perceptive councillors realized that the emphasis of any campaign needed to be on the city’s Welshness.16 Yet this was something even the city’s own residents were unsure of, no matter how much some of their elected representatives were playing up the issue. The writer Bernice Rubens, who grew up there in the 1930s and 1940s, recalled: ‘Cardiffians were an ambivalent people, nervous and with an unsure identity’.17 To many of the city’s residents, the adjective ‘Welsh’ could be derogatory, signifying something backwards and old fashioned. This did not mean that they did not regard themselves as Welsh but mid twentieth-century Cardiffians widely regarded themselves as different, neither quite English nor Welsh.18 The creation in 1951 of a Minister for Welsh Affairs, based in London but with an office in Cardiff, was a step forward in itself since it moved towards making 4 the city a seat of governance. The government, however, remained cautious on the issue of a capital because of the lack of agreement in Wales; it felt Cardiff would simply evolve as a capital as more government work was concentrated there.19 Moreover, the MPs of Wales objected to playing second fiddle to the Council of Wales, a non-elected body, in recommending such matters. As long as Caernarfon maintained a claim, then north Walian MPs would oppose Cardiff. George Thomas, the Labour MP for Cardiff West, tried to sidestep this opposition by asking the new Minister for Welsh Affairs in December 1951 if he would recognise Cardiff as capital. The Minister replied that he had no power to do so but if there was general agreement throughout Wales there would be no need for his ‘puny words’.20 A Ministry for Welsh Affairs had been created because of pressure from Welsh MPs for a Welsh Secretary of State in the Cabinet. This pressure was partly the result of the enhanced sense of Welshness that the war had created but it was also rooted in how fragile the post-war economy felt amidst the slow process of restructuring and the powerful memories of the inter-war depression. The feeling amongst the majority of Wales’ MPs was that only a Welsh voice in government could prevent a return to those conditions.21 The desire for a capital city in and outside Cardiff was also part of that fragile but growing national awareness. One Cardiff councillor recorded that he and his fellow campaigners maintained that a national centre would typify the outward expression of the nation’s attainments and become a source of inspiration to further national efforts. It was felt that a capital would be an acknowledgement of the separate identity of Wales and provide an official focus for the national life.22 Cardiff Corporation was certainly showing itself to be more aware of being in Wales. Prompted by a request from the public, it decided in 1951 to fly the Welsh flag at City Hall and the Law Courts. It also gave a grant towards a Welsh National Biography, Welsh names to streets and schools and supported calls for Welsh representation on the Royal Standard and coinage.23 For all the uncertainty many residents had about the nature of their own Welshness, their elected representatives were trying to enhance the sense that Cardiff was a Welsh city, if only through symbolic measures. Llandrindod had dropped its capital claim after the Council for Wales reported and although Aberystwyth still wanted the title councillors felt that Caernarfon was 5 the city’s clear rival.24 Cardiff Corporation considered approaching Caernarfon to try and form some agreement but this was rejected after some councillors felt it was beneath the city’s dignity. A private meeting of senior council members in Cardiff argued that the city should not take the initiative. Cllr Llewellyn Jenkins, who opposed this view, recalled the general feeling of the meeting was ‘If the capital was to come to Cardiff, let it come in its own good time. There was no enthusiasm for it, probably because they considered it would never come to pass’. Jenkins, in contrast, argued that ‘nothing comes of itself’ and the council should try to be ‘the creators of history’.25 A new Lord Mayor reinvigorated things and he and Jenkins decided to ignore fellow councillors and meet the Mayor of Caernarfon on neutral ground to discuss the issue. There was no agreement at the two meetings they held but the Cardiff representatives agreed that if their city was made capital there would be no objection to any future investiture of the Prince of Wales being held at Caernarfon. The parties involved also met the Welsh Minister who promised to look into the constitutional issues that creating a capital might raise. News of these meetings leaked out and other towns were unimpressed at it all being discussed in private but in the subsequent furore it became apparent that Cardiganshire County Council was willing to support Cardiff rather than Aberystwyth, a vital breakthrough against the parochialism that had hitherto haunted the debate. The west Wales council was thus persuaded to bring the matter before the Association of Welsh Local Authorities. Not everyone in Cardiganshire thought this a good idea, with one Alderman even fearing it would lead to the breakup of the Association but a ballot of local authorities went ahead.26 Cardiff received 134 votes, Caernarfon 11, Aberystwyth 4 and Swansea 1; 31 authorities did not vote including large counties like Monmouth, Montgomery, Newport, Denbigh and Anglesey. Despite this, a senior civil servant called it ‘an almost startling degree of unanimity for Wales’.27 Caernarfon and Aberystwyth accepted the vote, and the government, after checking with the Queen and deciding not to raise the issue of whether capital status referred to Wales or Wales and Monmouthshire, concurred. Cabinet was briefed: The question of a capital is one of prestige for the people of Wales, and to refuse recognition to Cardiff would undoubtedly give great offence. Although an announcement might stimulate a demand for further devolution of functions – which would not be out of harmony with the 6 Government’s policy – there would be little risk of encouraging pressure for Welsh independence, or for the appointment of a separate Secretary of State for Wales.28 To avoid giving the decision too much importance, the announcement was made in a reply to a written question in Parliament on 20 December 1955.29 The leading councillor in Cardiff’s campaign recalled the disappointment ‘with the manner of the announcement. No legal entanglements to be unravelled as anticipated. No flourish of trumpets. After all, it was an epoch-making landmark in the life of Cardiff and of Wales.’30 That did not stop the Civic Buildings and Markets Committee of Cardiff council recording in its minutes that it received the statement ‘with acclamation’.31 The following day the Town Clerk told the council This is a moment of deep emotion. For the people of Wales it is the fruit of thirty years of aspiration and endeavour. For the citizens of Cardiff it is an honour of which we may all feel proud. Let us strive to be worthy of the status of a Capital City and dedicate ourselves to the service of our beloved country of Wales.32 There was a short ceremony and speeches at the entrance to City Hall. Elsewhere in Wales, the announcement was welcomed as recognition of Welsh nationality, although politicians in the north were cautious in their language and expressed hope that Cardiff would act on its new title and serve Wales.33 Developing a capital Creating a new capital was hardly unique. Bonn, for example, had been made capital of West Germany in 1949. Other nations such as Australia or Brazil had even moved their capitals in the twentieth century. Nor was there any international norm on what should constitute a capital and disputes over location were far from unknown. Indeed, capitals are so varied across the globe that academics have struggled somewhat to identify common threads that define their experiences.34 Nonetheless, what makes the history of Cardiff more unusual is that little happened after the appointment. The Council decided to host an official St David’s Day celebration at City Hall and it raised questions of whether there should a royal residence in the city, the future title of the Lord Mayor, the drawing up of an official document and the possibility of a national ceremony. The Home Office however refused these requests, although it asked the College of Heralds for a change in the city’s coat of arms.35 That happened 7 and the Lord Mayor did eventually get to call him or herself ‘The Right Honourable’. In more practical terms, the city continued to hold an important regional role, acting as a focus for trade, industry and leisure in south Wales, but capital status appeared to mean little beyond that. Unlike in other new capitals, there were no new buildings or grand redesigns of civic space intended to symbolize the values of the nation.36 Instead, the focus of the city’s planning remained rather reactive, focussed on meeting housing needs and the problems of the basic infrastructure such as the city’s highways. However, from the late 1950s central government began to take an interest in the city’s development in a way it did not with provincial English cities. It rejected city council plans for the redevelopment of the centre of Cardiff, essentially for not being ambitious enough, and in 1964 it made the council take on specialist advice. This led to Colin Buchannan, the best-known planner of the day, being commissioned to draw up a new development plan for the city. He was very much influenced by the idea of creating a capital city and recommended greater commercial, administrative and education facilities, as well as a national theatre and opera house, to create a compact city centre worthy of being the focus of a nation. The government and city council happily bought into this vision but many residents were less convinced because of the need for large-scale compulsory purchases of homes in order to expand the civic centre and build a major inner-city highway. In the end, the housing clearances proved too controversial to push through, while a general economic downturn in the early 1970s led to the abandonment of the wider scheme. But the sense that the city’s authorities should be planning to create a city that resembled a capital remained, even if little had happened to actually make that happen.37 Outside the city, capital status had done little to create much feeling for Cardiff. In a 1973 story one woman fears the temptations laid before her husband who works in the capital: there was all the difference in the world in those twelve stretching miles leading down to Cardiff. She saw them stretching out in her mind’s eye, Treforest, the Estate, Taff’s Well, Whitchurch, and then the environs of the capital city opening up like the red light district in some lurid American film. Downtown What-You-Call, she thought. She’d give him Downtown! Bloody Cardiff … It was so cold compared to the valleys. Oh, why couldn’t he get a job at home?38 8 A 1958 letter to the South Wales Echo from someone in Merthyr complained that he came to Cardiff a few times a year and found the people ‘stuck up and distant’. He could sit in a pub for a whole evening without anyone speaking to him and found that people reacted with incredulity when they heard him speak Welsh.39 Such complaints of unfriendliness were echoes of provincial attitudes to metropolitan centres everywhere but its roots were more profound. There was some resentment of how the city’s splendour had been built on coal but it offered little back to the industrial areas to which it owed its existence. Such feelings intensified as the industrial valleys slipped into decline from the late 1950s. Job opportunities were increasingly dispersed as older mines and works closed down and were replaced by factories elsewhere. This all undermined the physical, social and emotional unity of valleys communities, creating a strong sense of decline and powerlessness.40 Cardiff, in contrast, seemed to have a stronger economic base and by 1961 a fifth of the city’s workforce lived outside the city borough.41 Commuting was not popular and this inevitably contributed to a population drift southwards, especially amongst the young. For them, Cardiff did have some glamour. A Rhondda schoolgirl thought it a grand, romantic city where my parents took me once a year on shopping trips. Cardiff was a city with a Lord Mayor, ancient castle and TWO railways stations, where the porter, ticket collector and station master weren’t the same man. It had elegant, smooth trains instead of swaying, jolting buses and restaurants with palm court orchestras in them – a place far posher and more awesome than Porth or even Pontypridd.42 But such views perhaps said as much about the valleys as Cardiff. Buchannan’s report described the city centre in 1964 as ‘worn out, inconvenient, drab and downright dangerous’.43 The year before capital status was granted, resentment of the city had grown amongst rugby supporters in the west after the Welsh Rugby Union decided to hold all future international matches in Cardiff because the facilities and profits were better there.44 This may not have been universally popular but it did at least give Cardiff some relevance in the wider Welsh community. The resurgence of the Welsh national rugby team, from the late 1960s and the rebuilding of Cardiff Arms Park into a modern National Stadium in the 1970s both gradually made the city a more genuine focus for Wales. On match days, thousands would descend on the capital from all 9 over Wales.45 Yet, beyond sporting internationals, few in the rest of Wales had any reason to visit Cardiff. Even if they wanted to, getting there was not easy since the M4 was still in its embryonic stages and the north-south links were in a dire need of upgrading. Thus one writer was quite right when he claimed in 1964 that the city was ‘little more than a name’ to those who lived in mid and north Wales.46 The old suspicions about the city’s Welshness remained too. In 1958 a reporter remarked ‘A foreigner could spend a week in Cardiff or Penarth and think himself still in England’, while writer Gwyn Thomas described Cardiff as ‘unWelsh as can be’.47 Even a 1961 schoolbook claimed that Cardiff was ‘quite English in attitude and its origin and growth are the result of alien influences.’48 Such attitudes revealed the divisions that existed within Welsh identity. Nonconformity and the Welsh language remained at the heart of popular conceptions of Welshness during the 1950s and 60s, an idea which literary and BBC portrayals of the country did little to discourage. Both were widely seen as old fashioned and repressive and the insistence of defenders of that culture that it was central to the Welsh nation consequently helped distance people from Wales itself. The power of these traditional conceptions of Wales meant that even those from the capital remained unsure of their identity. Thus one man who spent his teens in the city as late as the early 1970s recalled, ‘it seemed that I was living in a kind of Welsh-flavoured England’. He supported Wales fanatically at rugby but felt different to the Welsh speakers he encountered; ‘we knew in our heart of hearts that we were ‘not really Welsh’’.49 Such feelings faded as the retreat of Nonconformity, the rising status and profile of the Welsh language and the spread of a patriotic Welsh media produced more positive attitudes to Welsh nationality in the south in the later 1960s and 70s but it was a slow process. Even in 1982 research suggested that in South Glamorgan, 43 percent of people were watching BBC1 West rather than BBC Wales.50 Cardiff’s official status was, however, enhanced by the creation of a Welsh Office in 1964 (to serve the new cabinet post of Secretary of State for Wales). Though answerable to the London government, it represented a significant advance in administrative devolution to Wales and it gave Welsh interests more clout and consideration in government. One outcome was a Welsh economic plan that hoped to see the city’s administrative and commercial base develop, increasing the importance of the city to the life and economy of south Wales.51 But how exactly that was to happen was not articulated and in 1968 there were just 496 permanent civil servants 10 employed by the Welsh Office in Cardiff. Its responsibilities were, however, extended in the subsequent decade and by 1979 it had 2,687 permanent staff.52 It was assisted by a growing number of publicly-funded national bodies formed over the 1960s and 1970s, all based in Cardiff. Yet, no matter how important these were in developing a Welsh administrative state with Cardiff at its heart, their impact was relatively limited on the wider public perception of the city. ‘Cardiff is not Wales and never has been’ wrote the literary editor of a leading Welsh journal in 1978.53 Yet, in many ways, Cardiff had become more Welsh, at least in a traditional sense. In 1969, following a request from Merched y Wawr (a Welsh-language version of the Women’s Institute), Cardiff City Council decided to give ten central streets bilingual nameplates, even though they had only ever known by English names. These were to be accompanied by new bilingual signs welcoming people to the city.54 In what geographers called a ‘quiet revolution’, the Welsh language itself was enjoying something of a renaissance in Cardiff. Between 1951 and 1981, the proportion of the city able to speak Welsh rose from 4.2 percent of the population to 5.9 percent, although this still meant there were only 14,245 Welsh speakers in the capital. Most were incomers in the higher occupational classes and had been attracted by employment opportunities in education, the media and government. They formed their own networks based on Plaid Cymru, youth groups, choirs, chapels and the like and one member of this group claimed ‘If you so chose, you could live your life completely in Welsh in Cardiff (aside from asking for milk in the corner shop)’.55 The growth of Welsh-speaking migrants to the city, as well as a wider re-evaluation of the importance of the Welsh language and the growing realization that speaking Welsh could be an advantage in the job market, created a demand for Welsh-medium education in the city. Before 1974, the Conservative-dominated city council had been strongly opposed to Welsh language teaching in local schools on the grounds that it was a passing fashion that could only be taught at the expense of a ‘useful’ foreign language such as French. Nor was there much support amongst the Labour Party in the city who often saw the language as elitist and exclusionary but they also recognized rising parent demand. In 1974 the party took control of the new South Glamorgan County Council (SGCC) and put a Welsh-speaking lawyer in charge of the education committee. Under his guidance, the city opened its first Welsh- language secondary school.56 11 There was also pride within the city itself in being the capital, however unsure some of its residents were about their personal Welshness. This became evident in the debates surrounding the radical reorganization of local government at the beginning of the 1970s. One-hundred-thousand people (allegedly) signed a petition against Cardiff being merged into a new county of East Glamorgan. The arguments involved were often emotive and centred upon the belief that Cardiff was being demoted to the status of ‘a mere district council’. Although the city’s capital status was not actually under threat that was the impression given by the campaign’s misleading literature.57 Intense lobbying and the Conservatives’ belief that they could dominate any county centred on the capital meant that rather than putting Cardiff into a large East Glamorgan, South Glamorgan was created, a county that was almost a greater-Cardiff and which flouted the general principle of the reorganization where no new administrative area was supposed to be dominated by a city. The creation of South Glamorgan was undeniably beneficial for Cardiff since it meant local government resources did not need to be shared with the more deprived industrial districts to the north that were struggling to cope with the decline of the coal industry.58 The recognition that Cardiff had been treated differently hardly engendered sympathy for the capital but the new authorities continued to make their symbolic nods towards Wales by increasing the number of bilingual signs, naming the new concert hall and shopping centre that opened in 1981 after the patron saint and erecting a statue of Aneurin Bevan, a Welsh hero but one with no connection to Cardiff. This could attract a degree of cynicism but it all helped develop Cardiff as a site of banal nationalism, a place where the background of daily life, whether that was the names and flags on buildings or the presence of Welsh on road and street signs, signalled to people that they were in Wales.59 Cementing a capital Thus, from the 1960s to the early 1980s, Cardiff developed into both a more meaningful capital and, in some ways, a more Welsh city but without being home to a democratic institution of government its capital status was always going to be circumscribed. A historian of the city claimed in 1988 that being capital had ‘little meaning’ and that the city was ‘merely the regional centre for a depressed industrial area masquerading as the capital of Wales’.60 The creation of some form of democratic self-government for Wales had been a matter of serious debate in Wales 12 since the mid-1950s. By the mid 1970s the rise of nationalist voting in Scotland had made the likelihood of political devolution very real. This encouraged the establishment of Welsh headquarters for banks, commercial firms and even the TUC, all of which were based in Cardiff and helped the city further its claims to be at the centre of Welsh public life. South Glamorgan County Council (SGCC) made much of the potential economic impact of the establishment of a Welsh Assembly in its planning policies. Yet the demands for devolution were derailed by concerns of cost, effectiveness and the old regional tensions. An editorial in the (north Wales) Daily Post claimed that the Assembly would be ‘a pretentious little super council, housed in a Cardiff backwater’.61 Even within Cardiff, the now Tory-controlled SGCC stuck to its political instincts and campaigned for a No vote at the 1979 referendum on devolution, despite what its plans said about the economic benefits. Just 13.1 percent of those who turned out in South Glamorgan voted yes. The failure of the 1979 referendum denied Cardiff an opportunity to claim a decisive role as the national capital and cost Cardiff an anticipated 1,000 jobs.62 The brakes had been put on political devolution but administrative devolution continued apace. In the 1980s the powers of the Welsh Office were further extended, while a host of new quangos were set up to monitor and govern Margaret Thatcher’s free-market state. This all led to the formation of new Welsh pressure and lobbying groups. By 1984, there were 466 ‘associations, movements, bodies, committees and institutions’ based on and in Wales.63 All this was concentrated in Cardiff thus furthering the gradual creation of an alternative bureaucracy worthy of a capital city. By the mid 1980s, as in so many large western cities, Cardiff’s councils were beginning to realize that it was in such developments rather than in traditional industry that the city’s future lay. Attempts to attract large-scale industrial development had failed and the 1983 decision of Nissan to locate in north-east England rather than Cardiff was a last straw for many. The county council thus saw its strategy had to switch emphasis and concentrate on the service sector in order to generate sufficient jobs.64 The first impact of this came in plans for the run-down area around Cardiff docks area. SGCC constructed a new county hall there in 1985, providing the initial catalyst for what would become the Cardiff Bay project, an ambitious attempt to transform not just the immediate environment, but the city and south Wales too. The project was a partnership between government, local authorities and private developers but its financial backer and driving force was the Welsh 13 Office. The motivation lay in a wish to modernize the Welsh economy and the knowledge that results would be much easier to achieve in Cardiff than in the valleys. The mix of housing, commercial, cultural and manufacturing developments that this was to be achieved by was a rather slow, ad hoc process that never quite lived up to expectations but it did raise ambitions in local government.65 This was evident in 1993 when SGCC launched its ‘Euro-Capital 2020’ strategy which was designed to turning Cardiff into a European city of the stature of Cologne, Copenhagen or even Barcelona.66 The aspiration was for Cardiff to compete for investment by raising its international profile and creating a quality of life comparable with Europe’s most desirable cities. The initial phase was the creation of a café quarter, complete with fashionable restaurants and pavement tables, but the central tenet of the project became the Millennium stadium. The aspiration for the stadium was that it would enable Cardiff to act as a capital by providing the rest of the nation with a landmark building that was important economically but would also act as a focal point for Welsh patriotism. Given the importance that sport had for Welsh national identity, the potential impact of the stadium here should not be underestimated but the city’s authorities also envisaged that the stadium would be a symbol of hope and modernity. The stadium’s marketing made clear how it was one of the finest sporting venues in the world, whilst in its retractable roof, it had a feature that was hi-tech, progressive and (in Europe) unique. Indeed, the stadium’s very name suggested something for the future.67 This mattered because much of the Euro-capital vision was about convincing the people of Cardiff of the worth of their city. As the preceding report commissioned by SGCC had noted, Cardiff was ‘too parochial in its self-image. It needs to think and present itself bigger on the larger European canvas’.68 The city’s authorities believed that creating a new physical infrastructure and environment was central to overcoming that and giving some substance to the rhetoric of regeneration. The Cardiff Bay Development Corporation in particular had a strong sense that it was providing for modern Cardiff what the civic centre had done for the city almost a century earlier. It may have believed it was creating a city that looked like a capital but the reality was that public spaces, street art and modernistic architecture were features of all urban regenerations. Nonetheless, by the start of the 21st century, with a new stadium, the Bay development finally started to reach fruition, the range of retail, hotel, eating and drinking facilities diversifying and the hosting of significant 14 events such as the Rugby World Cup final, the FA Cup final and a European heads of state summit, residents finally started to develop a perception that Cardiff was a city that was going somewhere or, as the marketing put it, Europe’s fastest growing capital. As one, generally cynical, novel put it: The new stadium dominated the centre and you could see it from almost anywhere in Cardiff. And, like pretty much everyone else, Tyra found it surprisingly inspiring. It suddenly made you aware that Cardiff was changing, that all the bollocks you heard people spit on the TV about being a European capital for the new century was really true.69 Measuring the actual impact of such ‘psychic’ benefits is impossible and not everyone was convinced.70 One writer described Cardiff as having ‘a slightly tentative air about it, as though the city was a rather wary woman who had brought some snazzy clothes for her first party after a divorce and wondered what everyone else would think’.71 However, closer to the views of ordinary residents was the academic whose hyperbole claimed that Cardiff was being transformed by a ‘momentum and drive that is almost palpable, even spiritual – you can feel the dynamism’.72 James Vernon has argued that the civic landscape of nineteenth-century English towns ‘represented the town to itself’ and articulated the purpose and destiny of the community.73 The physical transformation of Cardiff can be seen in the same light. Just as the grand buildings of the late Victorian and Edwardian era symbolized the grandeur, wealth and stature of Cardiff’s commerce, the new physical environment spoke both to local citizens and outsiders of a new purpose and future for the city, one worthy of a capital city. Politicians and administrators in Cardiff claimed that the city’s development would benefit the whole of Wales, and it did attract investment that would probably have otherwise gone to England.74 With talk of an economic boom in Cardiff, there began to develop a real sense of resentment that the rest of Wales was being overlooked by government in favour of the already prosperous capital.75 Jan Morris complained in 1984 that post-industrial Cardiff was ‘less than a dozen miles from the aching sadness of the Rhondda, where a way of life, a language and a faith were still wasting away in redundancy and unemployment’.76 As the last remnants of the coal industry closed in the late 1980s and early 1990s such feelings intensified. The boldness of the new European capital rhetoric further rubbed the economic 15 differences in the face of the rest of the nation. Local authorities began to complain about the public money being pumped into the Cardiff Bay project. A particular gripe was the building of a £197m barrage that did nothing but damn two tidal rivers to attract investors who would apparently not come unless they had a nice waterfront to look at. Llew Smith, the Labour MP for Blaenau Gwent, summed up, ‘It’s one of the greatest financial scandals of post-war Britain, it’s been a disgrace. They’ve poured money into the glorified lake while the rest of Wales is starved of cash’.77 Rhodri Morgan, a Cardiff MP, argued that Cardiff could not become a proper European capital until it had a degree of its political devolution.78 That became a reality after a successful referendum in 1997 to create a Welsh Assembly, although 55 percent of the vote in Cardiff was against devolution. It had always been envisaged that the Assembly would be located at Cardiff City Hall. However, a dispute over how much the city council should be paid for the building led the government to invite alternative tenders. There were 24 applications from across Wales, including a very professional one from Swansea which depicted Cardiff as more concerned with its own needs rather than those of Wales. But the exercise was something of a sham and the chances of locating the first democratic instrument of Welsh selfgovernment outside the capital were never likely. Nonetheless, the fact that it was considered at all, even half-heartedly, illustrated the limitations of Cardiff’s capital status.79 But the dust settled and the Assembly was located in Cardiff, making it a genuine capital for the first time in its history, a home of a national democratic government. This did not necessarily help the wider perception of Cardiff because devolution itself was widely marked by cynicism and apathy, leading to attitudes towards the capital and the Assembly becoming somewhat conflated. Polls suggested that people in north Wales felt ignored and neglected by the Assembly. Even some northern Assembly Members perceived and resented a southern bias in power and the allocation of resources.80 Less than a quarter of respondents to the 2007 Welsh Life and Times Survey thought that the Welsh government looked after all parts of Wales more or less equally. An impressive new building may have been built to house the Assembly - sustainable, open and not too grand, to fit in with the image of Wales that its new government hoped to portray – but that did not mean that people valued the symbolism. Indeed, rather than winning everyone over, the new £67m Senedd, as it was called, furthered suspicions that all the public investment was going into the capital. To overcome resentment of devolution and distribute its economic benefits, 16 Welsh government offices were moved to Aberystwyth, Merthyr and Llandudno Junction. The city council meanwhile began to focus more on building (or least highlighting) Cardiff’s regional economic importance. But again there was a degree of self-interest here. Strengthening the regional role of Cardiff became important because city was felt to be small to compete on a genuine European stage.81 The continued resentment of Cardiff was not entirely unsurprising. Between 1984 and 2004 the growth in employment in the coastal local authorities was more twice those of the Valleys.82 By 2005 Gross Value Added (a measure of economic contribution) in west Wales and the valleys was 36 percent below the UK figure, a fall of some ten percent from a decade before. In Cardiff and the neighbouring Vale of Glamorgan however, GVA had stayed fairly steady in the same period, at around 7 percent above the UK figure.83 The resentment of this can be put down to a ‘zero- sum’ outlook, a belief that only a finite amount of development is possible and thus Cardiff’s gains are the valleys’ loses.84 Yet Cardiff actually has forty percent of its business rates redistributed by the government to the rest of Wales. Moreover, not all the expanded number of jobs went to residents of the city and the numbers commuting into Cardiff rose from a fifth of the workforce in 1961 to more than a third in 2008. This meant that there were 67,200 people from other parts of Wales who worked in Cardiff.85 This brought its own congestion problems for the city but it was a very real economic benefit that extended beyond the capital. Conclusion In many ways Cardiff’s post-war development was fairly typical of medium-sized UK cities: the shift from a mixed industrial base to a service-driven economy, the regeneration of its built environment and the overshadowing of its immediate hinterland. The city’s local authorities repeatedly claimed that these developments were driven by the desire to create a city worthy of being capital but the reality was that they were echoed everywhere, and often more successfully.86 The transformation of Cardiff is only remarkable when the point of comparison is Cardiff itself in the past rather than other cities in the present. However, as a capital city, Cardiff’s history is different to English cities beyond London. Cardiff was expected to contribute to its wider hinterland, and indeed regions in north Wales which could not in any way be described as part of the city’s natural region, in ways which similar-sized English cites were not. Yet 17 precisely what was expected was never articulated beyond some loose sense of making an economic contribution. Such demands were driven by how capital status also gave the city more publicity and more public (and thus in turn private) investment than would otherwise be the case.87 Indeed, it is the level of government intervention in the development of Cardiff that marks the city’s history out. This was motivated initially by a desire to create a worthy capital city and then by a philosophy that believed there would be a trickledown effect to the rest of Wales from the economic growth of its capital. Cardiff was also helped by the fact that it was home to a branch of government. The Welsh Office combined the functions of many different Whitehall departments. This simplified the centre-local relationship and made direct liaison far easier than in England. Local authority officers and members could speak directly to one minister and his civil servants rather than several different groups, each with their own (sometimes conflicting) departmental views and interests. Moreover, Welsh Office officials ‘travelled the same streets and lived in the same houses’ as the local authority representatives that they met.88 This contributed to a shared commitment between the Welsh Office and the city authorities to develop Cardiff and helped ensure the injection of significant sums of government money. Appreciating the role of the state in the development of Cardiff as capital also lends some credence to the resentment that often arises towards capital cities, a resentment that networks of powers and influence were too focussed on those cities to the cost of the rest of the nation. While these networks often lay behind closed doors, their impact was only too visible in the grand built environments of capitals, where, as Sutcliffe notes, local and national governments tried ‘to produce an image appropriate to national or civic mythology’.89 In Cardiff this contributed to what one academic commentator described as a ‘schizophrenic attitude’ to Cardiff in Wales, where pride and resentment were mixed.90 The nature of that resentment shifted over the post-war period. It began focussing on how Cardiff was not representative of traditional Welsh culture. That mattered less as the ideas of what constituted Welshness shifted and the political importance of Cardiff grew. But this just created new tensions that Cardiff was gaining more from being capital than Wales was from having a capital. Once Cardiff became a seat of government then those tensions grew even more as economic disparities widened. Whereas once Cardiff had benefitted from a government keen to see the UK wealth dispersed more equally beyond London, now Cardiff itself was the centre of power and it had to face up to demands that it do its bit to ensure a more 18 equitable division of prosperity. Achieving that was not easy but the growing wealth gap between Cardiff and the rest of Wales did, at least, affirm the city as somewhere unique within Wales. Cardiff may not have become any more loved by the rest of Wales but its status as capital was indisputable. 19
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