Don’t accept museum, celebrate Tiger Bay

WHAT a superb article by Carolyn Hitt concerning the outrageous proposal to build a Museum of Military Medicine in Cardiff Bay!

Why indeed is the history of that unique and famous quarter of Cardiff, Tiger Bay, not being celebrated instead?

It’s perhaps one of Wales’ greatest qualities that it has been able to assimilate people from diverse backgrounds without losing its identity and we should celebrate it.

An excellent TV documentary some years ago featured an African American academic who wanted to trace the roots of his Welsh surname.

He was taken round Cardiff in a taxi driven by a Welsh-speaking Cardiffian of Somali ancestry who’d been born in Tiger Bay.

Exactly the kind of Welsh diversity that the article sought to illustrate.

If a museum is to be built on this site then surely it should reflect the lives of this unique Cardiff community rather than yet another celebration of the military.

How ironic that no-one in England seems to want it. This seems like yet another desperate attempt to wrap us in the Union Flag, attempts that have grown increasingly shrill over the last 20 years. How lightly indeed we throw away our own history.

As Carolyn says, “We never understand our own history well enough because we always have to give room to the UK perspective”.

The current health crisis has brought the difference between Wales and England into sharp relief and made obvious the contempt with which Westminster governments of any stamp – particularly the Tories – regard us.

The people behind the museum proposal refer to it as being “a national home” but whose nation is it?

The patronising tone of their offer to perhaps display some of the artefacts and memorabilia from the old Butetown History and Arts Centre is nauseating. Cardiff is apparently seen by them as a useful hub for easy access to London, south west England and the Midlands.

Council leaders apparently think that bringing a “national collection” to the city would “enhance its status as a European capital”.

How they hope to achieve this by housing someone else’s “national collection” in the capital city of Wales escapes me. If Cardiff City Council accepts this then they should be utterly ashamed of themselves and will deserve all the public contumely that will come their way.

In some ways this is another Tryweryn moment.

Ian Seaton Mumbles, Swansea