Series pulls threads together to give history of city’s docks
THIS is my favourite time of year, and we’ve been so lucky with the weather, haven’t we?
I hope you’ve been enjoying the splendour of autumn in the recent sunshine.
Sunday was yet another brilliant blue-skied day so we, along with thousands of like-minded Cardiffians, took a stroll along the Barrage to Mermaid Quay.
How lucky we are to have Cardiff Bay.
Blue cranes aside, if you don’t work in the docks or have a view of it from a high rise Bay apartment then it’s quite easy to forget that we still have a large busy port.
Owned and operated by ABP (Allied British Ports), it actually covers 852 acres and handles around 1.7 million tonnes of cargo every year. (It also has a number of beehives, tended to by port manager Callum Couper – bet you didn’t know that. ABP’s website for ABP is a font of information!)
Anyway, on Sunday I was looking in that direction a little more than usual, since the modern port featured large in the first episode of Dock of the Bay, a four-part series on ITV Wales on consecutive Tuesdays at 7.30pm.
It’s a brilliant overview of the rise, decline and rebirth of Cardiff’s docklands, and we hear from many a local or former resident whose words evoke a sense of place.
“There were people who came from all over the world, so we learnt a lot about each other and it gave me an open outlook towards people,” says Tiger Bay’s Gaynor Legall.
“It conjures up [memories of] friends and friendship and safety, a sense of belonging and being safe.”
Dock of the Bay is filmed, directed and produced by Carwyn Jones. (No, not that one!)
Having randomly met Carwyn last week through a mutual friend, Mary, at the Grange pub quiz, I was keen to ask him some (easier) questions about how he went about making the series and what inspired him to do so.
“I’d waited many years for someone to make a television series that joined all the dots, that told the story of how Cardiff was, and still is, shaped by the docks. But no-one ever did,” says Carwyn.
“There would be the odd programme that focused on one aspect of the past but would invariably side line all the other elements.
“Tiger Bay has, quite rightly, featured in a number of programmes over time, but those programmes rarely mentioned other dockland communities, like Newtown or Splott, that coexisted and flourished in 19th century Cardiff.
“Dock of the Bay was a chance to pull all those threads together and tell a more rounded history of this corner of the Welsh capital.”
Needless to say, 92 minutes of telly isn’t going to cover every tiny aspect of the docks over the last 200 years.
“For me, the biggest challenge was deciding what to include and what to leave out,” says Carwyn.
“What we really wanted to achieve in the series is provide both context and continuation; revealing the capital’s past but also exploring the present day echoes and parallels in the new landscape of Cardiff Bay.
“I must confess I spent many hours with my head in my hands trying to find ways to link, say, the Edwardian heyday of Cardiff’s coal trade with the shiny waterfront of Mermaid Quay.”
Dock of the Bay pulls those threads together and finds those links very well.
The rapid rise and lengthy decline of industrial boomtown Cardiff is well known but the number of topics it manages to deftly cover and the constant return to the present day is very refreshing.
It also looks superb. The drone photography of the Bay is spectacular (“Most of the shoot coincided with a
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In last night’s episode, old and new is compared and contrasted cleverly as American photographer John Briggs returns to modern Cardiff Bay to take photos in the places that in the 1970s he spent time documenting forlorn industrial decay.
Regardless of how much you know about the docklands and Tiger Bay, I bet there are things you’ll learn from Dock of the Bay.
For example, in the first episode likeable presenter Adeola Dewis, who herself is a local resident for the last 15 years, visits the magnificent Pierhead building.
Led by tour manager Richard Gwyn Jones, Adeola climbs up the rather “pre-refurb” interior of its clock tower to see, not just the inside of the clock’s huge faces, but higher up, the old, dusty bell.
Did you know it had a bell? I don’t think I’d ever thought about it.
Sadly, the bell’s mechanism no longer works. Wouldn’t it be brilliant for it to chime again one day?
Next week’s episode features the building of the Barrage, the wartime sacrifices of local people, modern tugboat pilots, and the sad story of the
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vanished community of Newtown.
Neither remembered nor replaced, Little Ireland, as Newtown was known, comprised six terraced streets between Tyndall Street and the train tracks. It was built by Bute to house a small army of Irish workers he imported to build and then work on the docks. It was razed in the 1960s with its residents dispersed across Cardiff.
“Almost overnight it became a wasteland,” says Carwyn.
“Eventually a trading estate was built where the terraced streets of Newtown once stood. It was no longer a place where people lived and played, worshipped at church or drank in their local pub. This was a close-knit community that had thrived for 120 years. You can certainly understand the sadness of people who have such fond memories of living in Little Ireland before the demolition.”
Cardiff sometimes feels like a city in a rush to forget its past.
“If there was more evidence of our maritime past still visible today, a series like Dock of the Bay might not need to have been made at all,” muses Carwyn.
■ The remaining two episodes of Dock of the Bay will be shown on 30 October 30 and November 6. You can watch the first two episodes at itv. com
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