The biographer of the ‘city beautiful’
MANY picture books have been published over the years on our beloved Cardiff.
Top of the list is surely the late Stewart Williams’ magnificent series of 36 Cardiff Yesterday volumes in which some 7,500 pictures have appeared since the first book was published in May 1980.
As the former Glamorgan archivist Patricia Moore wrote in her foreword to the final book: “The volumes of Cardiff Yesterday document both the enduring and the changing buildings of the city, and the wider streetscapes too.
“Aerial photographs show at a glance the growing area of bricks and mortar swallowing farms and fields.
“Against this background it is the people of Cardiff who are celebrated.”
When I was co-ordinator of the City Hall based Historic Records Project in the 1980s, I had the honour of writing the foreword to Cardiff Yesterday No 21. I recalled then how buildings such as the Drill Hall, Sophia Gardens, the Guildford Crescent Swimming Baths, Coronet Cinema and even my old school St Peter’s RC Secondary Modern had been knocked down to make way for a block of flats.
When I published my A Cardiff Century: A Capital City for Wales – which drew chiefly on the archives of the Western Mail & Echo for the bulk of the images – Stewart Williams kindly wrote the introduction to the book.
He wrote: “In the inter-war years Cardiff was known as the ‘City Beautiful.’
“Today it has much else to be proud of – The Bay developments, which have transformed an area of depressing dereliction into one of the best examples of urban regeneration in Europe, and the splendid Millennium Stadium, which thanks to television has brought international recognition to the city.
“The skyline too has been altered with modern office blocks, luxury flats and multi-storey car parks replacing old familiar places which are still fondly remembered by septuagenarians like myself.”
Exactly so.
And it is thanks to Stewart Williams’ superb Cardiff Yesterday series that future generations of Cardiffians will have some idea of how their grandparents lived, loved, worked and died in our beloved Cardiff.
And here are some quick facts about the series:
A full set of Cardiff Yesterday books sells for more than £500;
numbers 19 and 27 are very rare;
the last Cardiff Yesterday book was published in 2000; and
Stewart Williams also published three volumes of The Cardiff Book and a series of the Glamorgan Historian in the 1960s.
Meanwhile, on a separate topic, a reader recently wanted to know where Williams Court was situated, and Leyton Greening informs me that it was at the end of Canal Street.