MORNING SERIAL
IT connects Cardiff city centre in the north with the newly developed Cardiff Bay in the south.
The bay, which has undergone an enormous restoration in the past few decades, is where the Welsh Parliament sits.
Butetown used to be part of an area known as Tiger Bay (the local name for the area of Cardiff which covered Butetown and Cardiff Docks). However, while the city centre and bay area that sandwich it have seen huge investment, transforming Cardiff into a modern capital, Butetown has become forgotten in Cardiff’s relentless expansion in the past 20 years.
Before Covid, the Butetown ward had the highest rate of child poverty in Cardiff at 46%, but this figure fails to capture the situation properly. Running parallel to Bute Street, to the east, is the recently built boulevard of Lloyd George Avenue (named after the only Welshman in the history of the union to become Prime Minister). Flanked by wellpresented flats, it is a stark contrast to Bute Street just 20 metres to the west, an affluent area of young professionals and Cardiff Bay politicos. Few of these people are living in poverty, and their residence in the ward acts to mask how bad the situation is on the Bute Street side.
Not that you can see Bute Street from Lloyd George Avenue.
Running between the two streets is an enormous stone wall which obscures the other from view. If you ever needed a visual representation of how deplorably many of Cardiff’s residents have been left behind by the city’s relentless growth, this is it. A few good kicks of a football would take you from Bute Street to the doors of the Welsh Parliament in the south or the newly built, swanky Ivy restaurant to the north. But Butetown is sandwiched in the middle, out of mind, one of Wales’s poorest places.
I give you the examples of city-centre Butetown and valley-based Penrhiwceiber to illustrate how widespread and multifaceted Wales’s poverty issue is.
> Independent Nation by Will Hayward is published by Biteback Publishing at £15 hardback and £9.99 ebook, https://www. bitebackpublishing.com/books/ independent-nation