Long-gone... but Little Ireland still has place in residents’ hearts
A once thriving part of Cardiff has now been erased from modern maps. Ruth Mosalski looks back at the area once known as Little Ireland
IT WAS once one of Cardiff’s busiest suburbs, an area packed with Irish Catholic families.
Now, all that remains is a small section of wall. The terraced houses demolished in the late 1960s have been replaced with high rises and new developments.
Newtown – or Little Ireland – is one of the lost districts of Cardiff, its history erased from modern maps, but which lives on through the stories of residents.
Newtown came to consist of six streets – Ellen Street, North Williams Street, Pendoylan Street, Pendoylan Place, Roland Street and Rosemary Street – immediately south of the railway and north of Tyndall Street.
Within the communities were several corner shops and a few public houses, but at the core was St Paul’s Church.
There was a public phone at the end of Tyndall Street, opposite the church.
Mary Sullivan, who grew up in Newtown, remembers someone putting a piece of carpet on the floor of the phone box. She was told the priest’s housekeeper put fresh flowers in there.
Huge families all lived in the same streets, playing games in the roads outside their front doors.
Saturday night was when the tin bath was brought into the living room.
She remembers her Aunty Nora being the first to get a bathroom in her house, and Terry Welsh getting the first TV.
“Everyone wanted to be Terry Welsh’s best friend,” she says.
“Babies were delivered assisted by the appointed unofficial street midwife. In our street it was Mrs Slade.
“When there was a death in the street the same Mrs Slade would oversee the washing of the body while an army of women would take care of cooking for the family, helping with the children and preparing the front room where the corpse would be laid out ready for a good old Irish wake. The wake could last two or three days and nights.”
The first Irish settlers had come in the years following the Irish potato famine of 1845 and the bad winter that followed. South Wales was a booming economic region. It offered hope to Irish people wanting a new start.
They built the docks and are credited by many as being those who built the foundations of our modern city.
The houses of Newtown were the first to be built outside the confines of the original town and became home to a community still celebrated today. But Newtown eventually deteriorated to slum conditions. The council issued compulsory purchase orders and people had to leave around October 1966, ahead of the demolition of the whole area.
All that remains now is a small section of wall, near the new Capital Quarter development.
It’s all a far cry from the start of the community.
As the first dock was built and workers were put to work on the Taff Vale Railway, the Irish population grew. A letter from 1849 describes the masses arriving on coal vessels.
They “bring over destitute Irish in very large numbers, who come to seek employment in this most desirable country. They partially find employment in the manufacturing districts, and from the cheapness of their labour, are also numerously employed in the agricultural parishes. At Cardiff, there is scarcely any work for them and they seldom find employment there but because they find houses to dwell in the town, they return to Cardiff to lodge”.
Cardiff in 1849 was dirty and full of dis-