Life on the hidden Cardiff have to travel through an Street that you archway to find
AS WE chat, Deborah Oliver is explaining how her dogs Lola and Angel were dressed in coats and crowns when King Charles visited Llandaff in Cardiff last year.
In between keeping the pair under control long enough for our photographer to take a picture, she couldn’t be happier talking about living on a street many don’t even know exists.
“We’ve got lots of Americans that come and do a little tour of Llandaff. They end up coming down this private row and find it beautiful,” she said. “It’s so peaceful.”
Business owner Deborah, 59, is talking about Spencer’s Row. Tucked away behind an old stone arch on Bridge Street in the city, it’s a place locals know about but which goes unnoticed by many passers-by.
“What’s so beautiful is it’s so quiet,” she said, the quaint row of terraced houses behind us. “We’re very near a busy main road, the A48 is just down there, and yet you can hear the birds. It’s like you’re in a little sleepy village. It’s Cardiff’s bestkept secret, I think.”
Despite its proximity to Llandaff’s High Street and popular spots like the Heathcock pub, you might walk past the street without even knowing. But walk under the small, stone arch between two houses on Bridge Street and you’ll find a small row of eight 19th-century terraced houses like something out of a movie.
Complete with classic street lights, quaint gardens and sheds to rival Dylan Thomas’ boathouse, it’s quite the sight considering it is mostly hidden from view, something those who live there delight in telling us.
“All the neighbours get together and have parties on the street,” Deborah tells us. “There aren’t many places you can sit outside in the middle of your road and enjoy yourself. There’s a great community spirit. Many times I’ve locked myself out and virtually all the neighbours have got a key to my house. It’s very friendly and everyone helps each other.”
According to the stories many of its residents past and present have shared over the years, Spencer’s Row was built in 1866 for people working in the Radyr quarry and workmen building the nearby Cathedral Road.
The original plan for the road was for a similar row of houses to be built on the side opposite, but byelaws were enacted in time to stop this.
“Fortunately everybody who lived here had the sense to go out and claim a bit of garden,” laughed Jo Coles, 74, one of the street’s longest-serving residents. “These were all built using Radyr stone which is very difficult now to get a hold of.”
The street is locally listed, meaning it is seen by Cardiff Council as having architectural importance to the area. For residents, this means making even small alterations to their homes is a bit more tricky.
“As time has gone on, it’s become quite a sought-after place,” Jo explained. “We’re bound by very strict conservation rules when we do anything. I know it took me about six months to get planning to change the windows, the extension etc, so it is very, very tight.”
The majority of residents on Spencer’s Row own their homes, and Jo says properties rarely crop up on the market. When they do, they are quickly snapped up. “There’s no hassle about selling them – if you want to sell them, they’re gone. One was sold last year and the first person that came along – it was gone.”
But Jo said this was a far cry from when she moved in a decade ago, when the houses were rundown and gardens were overgrown. “Some of them were in pretty bad shape. If you look at pictures that I’ve got when it was sold, it was a mess. Everything was old and needed painting, the garden was over
grown. I’ve lived in Cardiff for a long time and I didn’t even know this place existed myself. I bought it at a reasonable price and did it up, and all of a sudden I think people woke up to the fact these are quite nice little places.”
With only a handful of residents sharing a road and with little fencing between gardens, locals say there is, as you’d expect, a huge sense of community on the street. Walking around on a sunny day, it seems the ideal setting for a garden party.
“It’s fab, absolutely fab,” Jo said. “We get together and have the odd glass of wine or gin in the evenings in the summer. You do get a sense when you come through that arch that you’re kind of away from the rest of the world. Sometimes you just don’t want to go out! It’s a lovely place to live.”
“It’s a little community of its own. We all do things together. We have parties out there in the summer, making sausage rolls and things. Everyone chips in.”
Although they share the same facade, the houses on Spencer’s Row are all different sizes - Jo said the ones closer to Bridge Street are smaller - and that many have been renovated or added to. But the history of the place remains. In 1941 during World War II, a German bombing raid killed 165 people in Cardiff and damaged Llandaff Cathedral,
a stone’s throw from the street.
“When the bomb was dropped on the cathedral, the last house on the street was in the blast line and it hit part of the house and skewed it a bit,” Jo explained. “So putting in windows is a nightmare, because nothing is quite straight. As is the case with the rest of them, as they settle over time.”
If that wasn’t enough history, just around the corner is the subject of myth and legend. Photos from the 1920s show a former sweet shop, Ms Tucker’s, on Bridge Street just before Spencer’s Row.
Some believe this is the sweet shop famous author Roald Dahl – originally from Llandaff – immortalised in his 1923 book Boy, something which is a bone of contention among locals. In 2009 a blue
plaque celebrating Dahl was erected close by on Llandaff’s high street, where many believe the actual sweet shop was at the time the book was written. Depending on who you ask, you’ll get varying answers.
The eye-catching street has also been featured on camera having been a stand-in venue for a coffin being delivered to a valleys back-street in Pobl-y-Cwm in around 1982.
Living in such a unique setting isn’t without its little challenges, though. Spencer’s Row is an unadopted private road, meaning residents are financially responsible for much of its upkeep.
Jo and the other residents have a shared fund that they use to maintain the road outside. Only recently they clubbed together to get the drains cleared at the cost of a few thousand pounds.
The low arch as you enter the street makes deliveries more difficult too. “Any time you have anything delivered, you have to go all the way out to Bridge Street,” Jo explained. “You can get a Bedford van down but anything bigger, you can’t. Moving in was a nightmare. I think sometimes people who don’t live here don’t understand how difficult it might be to get in and out [in a car].” Deborah added. “It can be quite difficult, especially if an ambulance or fire brigade needs to get here.”
Being in such a tight space often leads to parking issues with residents coming out onto Bridge Street having trouble getting around parked cars. Residents say there have been many scrapes and near misses over the years and some have been vying with the council in a bid to get more double yellow lines on the nearby street.
But on the street itself, residents have their own parking spaces in front of their houses – a rarity in Llandaff.
Jo moved to Spencer’s Row after her husband died and, perhaps unsurprisingly, said she can’t see herself wanting to leave. “I may have to one day when I can’t look after myself, but not in the interim. I put a lot of effort into this place, it was falling down when I bought it. There’s a lot of history.”
The most practical question of all for a street where the bags of seagull-ravaged rubbish usually seen in Cardiff are notably absent – where are the bins?
There could only be one place. “We all put our bins under the arch and they get taken on a Wednesday,” smiled Jo.