I first moved to live in Cardiff in 1982, when I was 26 and had one small son; my husband got a job at the university, training teachers. I loved it right away. It was such a tolerant, witty city after Cambridge, where I never felt I fitted in: a don in a gown had complained aloud in the street because I was pushing a pram along the pavement.
I didn’t exactly fit into Cardiff either – I was so patently English and middle-class – but the place didn’t seem to mind me. After all, it’s a city built out of its immigrants – they came to south Wales in the great industrial expansion to work in the coal mines and steel works, from rural west Wales and south-west England, Ireland, everywhere. In 1800 the city’s population was less than 2,000; by 1911 it was more than 180,000. The first Somali sailors came to Cardiff docks in the 1890s, and Somali epic poetry, one of the world’s great oral traditions, was recited in the dock cafés here.
Tessa Hadley outside the Wales Millennium Centre © Joseph Horton
When we arrived in the 1980s, the docks south of the city centre were derelict and melancholy, wooden pilings jutting out of the tidal mud; south Wales’s industrial moment was over. The grand dockland banks and insurance offices, and the Coal Exchange where fortunes were made, stood empty. Then in the ’90s a barrage was built to create a marina and renew the Bay. It’s not exactly gentrified like nearby Bristol’s dockland development, because the sociology isn’t the same, and there isn’t as much money here as in Bristol. But the Bay is cheerful and full of the city’s people, who come for its festivals, musicals, food fairs, restaurants and cinemas.
