This may well be unfair, but I think that Cardiff’s profile which seems to have risen dramatically in line with its progress as a cultural hub and improvements (in line with all UK cities during the boom years) has occurred in spite and not as a result of the tourist board and any marketing campaigns. When speaking to non-Cardiff and non-Welsh friends of friends (in the 28-35 age group) about my hometown most have either been to Cardiff and rate it, or have heard only good things about the place.

In terms of being unloved by the Welsh, I think this is largely untrue except on a petty, superficial level (after all, Cardiff for all its Englishness and ‘foreigners’ is filled with Welsh people from all around Wales). But I agree that Cardiff – which after all only exists because of coal from the valleys – needs to ‘bring Wales along with it’ if it is to be the successful young capital it clearly aspires to be. Whether this will be achieved through actual action or sheer rhetoric is another matter.

As for buildings, Cardiff has some lovely ones, true. I do sometimes just stop and look up when on St Mary Street and admire what we so often ignore or take for granted. But I have to question the claim that Cardiff’s architectural delights – aside from the arcades that are this city’s gems – make it Britain’s greatest Victorian-Edwardian city. We may not need to row about this, however: I perceive that it wouldn’t suit the prevailing mentality of the people marketing Cardiff to promote it as Britain’s anything.

I haven’t read every single post under this, but I really have to agree that transportation is nightmarish in Wales. How the hell can a person get from Llangollen to Cardiff easily? Is it possible? I may be a dreamer but I think Wales needs a north/south railway that doesn’t have to creep up the west coast or hop over into England to function.

Ach, it’d cost a bomb but if you really want all of Wales to benefit from a stronger Cardiff, then surely they need to be connected. Not just by randomly timed buses coughing their way along curving mountainous roads…

I think a Holyhead-Dublin railway tunnel would be bloody marvellous. Imagine being able to travel from Wales to the Republic by train. Or from Dublin to Paris for that matter…

And a tunnel from Belfast to Glasgow/Edinburgh via Stranraer… But then I love trains.

Course, knowing our transport systems, you’d have to remortgage your house to buy a ticket….

What’s more, I think a Holyhead-Dublin railway tunnel would be bloody marvellous. Imagine being able to travel from Wales to the Republic by train. Or from Dublin to Paris for that matter…

And a tunnel from Belfast to Glasgow/Edinburgh via Stranraer… But then I love trains.

Course, knowing our transport systems, you’d have to remortgage your house to buy a ticket….

Mind you, if the tunnel under Caerphilly mountain had not been built, maybe Newport would be our capital.

You describe Cardiff ‘ the More vital still is the need to recognise Cardiff for what it is: Britain’s greatest Victorian-Edwardian city. Cardiff is to Victorian architecture what Dublin is to Georgian.’
It has not got the amount of Architecture here to qualify your assertions.
What Cardiff has got is modernity, a lib dem council and improved cycle networks.

You want tourist trade more for Wales…the way your party voted on the badger cull , including you will put off tourists and a perception of Wales as an agrarian land not in tune with modern ways of doing things.

I am a north east Welshman, living in Anglesey who has lived and worked in London and Bristol.
Cardiff for me has been:
a) The place where, as young Welsh child, I was taken to stand outside where the Commonwealth Games was happening. I didn’t rate in the same way as the holiday in London as a civic education for a boy from Ffynnongroew. In 1956 it had little meaning as a national capital.
b) an inconvenient place to get to when I had to attend meetings of (WJEC, WDA, S4C, WTB…………) and somewhat resentful of it – and having to rush down St Mary’s to get a seat on that train north (to avoid the change at Crewe)
c) A pleasant place to deliver and collect my daughter from Uni and her early posts in hospitals – a city I would gladly spend more time in.

I have a long history of inter-regional collaboration. It is easier for me to work on knowledge transfer programmes with anywhere else in Europe than it is to collaborate with anyone in Cardiff. I am currently working with Wales European Funding support with Dublin – and I am off to project start meetings in Barcelona and Helsinki next month. There does seem to be a marked lack of incentive to do similar kind of activity with Cardiff.

I think it is a national issue for us to find ways to love Cardiff but moreover for Cardiff to love the rest of us- and living there or having lived there should not be a qualification. Although ArrivaTrains have made things better, transport will remain a big problem.

Broadcast and new media ( cheers Wales Home) can make a significant contribution too- and full marks to the Welsh National Theatre.

The Butes did not contribute anything to Cardiff in the same way the Chamberlains did to Birmingham.

David Melding’s essay was well meaning but somehow I think it deserved the Ire that it received from Russell Goodway and the ridicule from Jeff Jones.

I grew up in Cardiff and my family came from the west country and Swansea during the 19th Century. My great great grandmother was turfed of her farm in St Mellons by Sir Charles Morgan because her late husband voted Liberal in the 1840s.

Also I have American step children who have visited Cardiff and had no desire to visit statues. Cardiff needs to market itself more to those overseas.

The Butes wealth was based on the fact that through marriage they inherited large tracks of land in South Wales which contained coal. Some of the coal they exploited themselves whilst leasing out the rights to mine to others who were often Welsh. They also had a virtual monopoly of the main export port for the coal until David Davies came along. They became mutli millionaires on the backs of those who really did the work in the depths of the mines and in the appalling working conditions of the docks. It had absolutely nothing to do with any entrepreneurial ability on their part. That was often provided by native Welsh men.

Powell Dyffryn wasn’t nicknamed Poverty and Death for nothing. I always laugh at that stylised statue of the miner by the Capital shopping centre. It really portrays what life was like for my ancestors who slaved for peanuts in order to allow others to buy Renoir paintings and build fantasy castles.

Perhaps a far better statue would be my great grandfather being brought home dead on a door after being killed in the local mine in 1904. My grandmother wasn’t even a year old. All this nostalgia for the past hides the reality I’m afraid.

Old Butetown wasn’t just a multi racial community it was also until the early 1960s the base where young women because of poverty were forced to become prositutes. Where the middle classes now pay a week’s wages for a meal the working classes from the valleys particularly on a Saturday night after a Cardiff City game drank before going with ‘a lady of the night.’

My late father often told me of the talk in the pit on a Monday after the night out down the Bute . It might have been chapel on a Sunday but for many it was down the Bute on a Saturday and then catch the Rodney train home to respectabilty.