The History and Architecture of Cardiff Civic Centre: Black Gold, White City

By John B. Hilling

Cardiff’s civic centre in Cathays Park, described as the finest civic centre in the British Isles, is an impressive planned group of public buildings, begun largely with wealth created by the coal industry in the south Wales coalfield. This book covers the Cardiff site’s earlier evolution as a private park in the nineteenth century by the fabulously rich Bute family, and the borough’s battles to obtain land for public buildings and the park’s development in the twentieth century, to become Britain’s finest civic centre. All the buildings, memorials and statues in the park are fully described and illustrated in this book which includes maps, plans and photographs. The History and Architecture of Cardiff Civic Centre is the first in the series Architecture of Wales, published in partnership with the Royal Society of Architects in Wales.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: May 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783168446

John B. Hilling

Before retiring, John B. Hilling was an architect and town planner. Born in Abertysswg, in the Rhymney valley, he now lives in Cardiff and is the author of nine books and numerous articles, mostly on historic architecture in Wales.

Book preview

Architecture of Wales

General Editor

Mary Wrenn

Royal Society of Architects in Wales –

Cymdeithas Frenhinol Penseiri yng Nghymru

Series Editors

Oriel Prizeman, Cardiff University

David Thomas, Catalina Architecture

Jonathan Vining

Advisory Panel

Irena Bauman, Director, Bauman Lyons Architects, Leeds

Richard Parnaby, Professor of Architecture, University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Alan Powers, author and architectural historian

Ian Pritchard, Secretary General, Architects Council of Europe (ACE)

Damian Walford Davies, Head of School, Cardiff School of English,

Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University

Published in cooperation with

The Royal Society of Architects in Wales –

Cymdeithas Frenhinol Penseiri yng Nghymru

Architecture of Wales

THE HISTORY AND ARCHITECTURE OF CARDIFF CIVIC CENTRE

Black Gold, White City

John B. Hilling

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2016

© John B. Hilling, 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN978-1-78316-842-2

eISBN978-1-78316-844-6

The right of John B. Hilling to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

With thanks to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales for supporting the publication of this book. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales is the investigation body and national archive for the historic environment of Wales. It has the lead role in ensuring that Wales’s archaeological, built and maritime heritage is authoritatively recorded and seeks to promote the understanding and appreciation of this heritage nationally and internationally.

Cover design: Olwen Fowler

Cover image: H. C. Fehr’s sculpture above the dome of the City Hall, Cardiff (image reproduced by permission of Cardiff City Hall).

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

Foreword Gillian Clarke

List of Illustrations

Introduction and Acknowledgements

Editorial Note

1A Small, Sleepy Town in the Shadow of a Castle

2Black Gold

3A Gentleman’s Park

4A Battle for Sites and Minds

5Negotiations and Diversions

6Plans and Petitions

7A View of the Civic Centre: Its Layout, Appearance and Open Spaces

8Development of the Civic Centre Before the First World War: Buildings and Monuments

9Development of the Civic Centre Between the Wars: Buildings and Monuments

10Development of the Civic Centre After the Second World War: Buildings and Monuments

11Cardiff’s Civic Centre in Context

12Conclusion

Brief Biographies of Architects

Architectural Glossary

Bibliography

Notes

Series Editor’s Preface

GIVEN THE CONVENTIONAL image of Wales as a land of song and poetry, architecture and the visual arts can be easily overlooked, a neglected poor relation to the country’s seductive musical and literary traditions. Relatively little has been published about the architectural heritage of our nation, despite the fact that buildings and places have been created in Wales that bear comparison with contemporaneous examples elsewhere, produced by architects engaged in the same wider cultural currents and discourse. There are many reasons for this: Wales has so often been judged as being too small, too homely, or simply not distinctive or fashionable enough to attract the sustained attention of architectural critics and historians. Add to this a lack of consistent patronage and a deeply-ingrained Nonconformist tradition that discourages any form of showing off, it is not surprising perhaps that we lack a more complete record of the architectural achievements of past generations.

Of course, the truth is that Wales has a rich built heritage, from the medieval to the modern. Its architectural character is very different from that of the other nations of the British Isles, and it is this very distinctiveness that deserves to be celebrated. The Royal Society of Architects in Wales is delighted to present, with the University of Wales Press, a series of books exploring the architecture of Wales, adding new chapters to the evolving story of the buildings, places and spaces of our ‘damp, demanding and obsessively interesting country’.¹

Mary Wrenn, Director RSAW

The Royal Society of Architects in Wales (RSAW) represents

and supports Chartered Members of the Royal Institute of

British Architects (RIBA) in Wales.

Foreword

Gillian Clarke

THE POWER OF PUBLIC BUILDINGS and their arrangement to influence the lives of those who live and work among them cannot be exaggerated. We should never underestimate the human need for beautiful spaces, or people’s ability to value ‘commodity, firmness and delight’ in their urban surroundings: the street sweeper, a tramp asleep on a bench beside a statue, the man who prongs litter in the park, the men and women who arrive before dawn to clean a public building, the bin-lorry men at the back doors, students basking on the lawns outside the university, the museum’s secretaries and doormen and chattering flocks of children herded by their teachers. All, entering a Civic Centre set among green spaces, gardens and trees, from the terraced streets and farther suburbs of the city where they live, can claim great buildings as their own for a few hours, but they will continue to inhabit them, and be inhabited by them, all of their lives.

By the time I was 10 years old, I was entranced by Cardiff’s Civic Centre, its enticing pathways, lawns and trees, its buildings as white as the ‘treasure-stones’, Penarth alabaster, found on the beach nearby. My favourite stone bear, couchant on the castle wall with his fourteen fellow beasts, was gate-keeper to a land of palaces, gardens, broad avenues, pillars, domes, a dragon, and a clock-tower you could see from miles away. Inside the white palaces were marble halls, curving staircases, statues, patterned tiles, and lofty spaces where I felt part of a fairy story. It was another country, and it was mine.

My reward for being good, while my father checked mail in his office at the BBC in Park Place, was our Saturday visit to the Museum: across the road, past the Gorsedd Gardens, up the wide flight of steps, under the white-pillared portico, and into the glorious lofty space of the hall. I ran to see my favourite treasure: the fox frozen forever in his glass case. A little later, it was the blue lady I most often visited, Renoir’s La Parisienne, dressed in every blue in the world, the blue of Porthkerry bluebell woods, lapis lazuli, cobalt, indigo and sky.

A recent visit to the gallery reminded me that I know that painting as well as I do, and others in the Davies bequest to the Museum, because I grew up with them. I possessed them. Later, as a new student at the University, at the Freshers’ Ball staged in the City Hall, I ran up the staircase into the Marble Hall, past statues of Welsh heroes, to dance to the music of John Dankworth and Cleo Laine.

After the clamour of shops and traffic, once over the canal where boys dived for pennies, something new began. A garden. A rose-coloured road. White stone. Sixty acres where a magic city gleamed among gardens, a perspective of luminous palaces leading through avenues of trees. I possessed it, and it possessed me.

The daily walk to College from Cardiff General Station – I see it as a map – took me up St Mary Street, High Street, past Greyfriars, over the Dock Feeder, up the rose-red avenue of elms, through Alexandra Gardens, over Museum Place, and through the white stone portal into the cool entrance hall of University College. I remember meeting my tutor to discuss my Spenser essay at a window seat in the half-light of the main hall; my Anglo-Saxon seminar in a little room up a narrow stone staircase, coal smoking in the grate; and sitting summer exams as the brass bands of the Miners’ Gala Parade passed by every June. In the upstairs gallery of the College library, where I studied for those exams, were little ‘rooms’, almost enclosed by a pair of bookcase ‘walls’: the third wall a book-lined walkway, the fourth open to a spacious view from the lofty ceiling to all that was happening on the floor below. I cannot forgive the barbaric destruction of that generous space, and its little rooms-with-a-view, by the insertion of a mezzanine floor. Nor do I forgive those who bulldozed the ruins of Greyfriars. I remember public outrage in the 1970s at a City Council transport department proposal to destroy the animal wall to make room for a highway. Public rage saved it. Even sadder, but nobody’s fault, was the loss of the double avenue of elms, planted for the third Marquess of Bute in 1779–80. In my university days they were a green cathedral. I walked that way when they were in full leaf just to see how the giants touched fingers across Edward VII Avenue, or the way their shadows lay on snow. I grieve for them still, long since dead from Dutch elm disease, felled like firewood beside the road.

This book tells the story of Cardiff’s Civic Centre in two ways, as a time-line and as a map. The time tells the story from the late eighteenth century to the present day. The map shows the 60 acres (24 hectares) of its architectural plan. At the far north end of Edward VII Avenue and Museum Avenue, Corbett Road draws a line west to east, a conclusion, the end. But it is not, quite. On the far side of Corbett Road, the two avenues of trees and roads continue through Queen Anne Square, separating yet connecting white stone and red brick, civic building and domestic houses. The border is marked by a white stone screen, through which can be seen the lines of the roads and the trees retreating into the distance between the red brick houses of an exclusive little estate. It was designed for the last Marquis by the architect, Howard Williams.

Cardiff’s Civic Centre was built from the wealth produced by coal and its transportation from what became the biggest coal dock in the world. My late father-in-law, and his father before him, were miners in Oakdale Colliery, part of the South Wales coalfield. Howard Williams, the architect who designed Queen Anne Square and its screen, was my uncle.

Architect

E. A. Rickards (1872–1920)

Such a tonnage of Portland stone,

shipped to a coal town as the century turned.

Luminous, Jurassic, pure as stacked ice,

and marble from Siena unloaded in the dirt

beside the black, black coal that paid for it.

Oh, to have been there, a hundred years ago,

Law Courts and City Hall complete,

flanking an avenue of sapling elms

among those sixty empty parkland acres,

there at the birth of a city;

to have stood that night with the young architect,

self-taught, flamboyant, garrulous,

in love with high Edwardian Baroque;

to have shared his grand romantic gesture,

bringing a friend to view his work by moonlight,

to see his buildings carved from ice,

the clock tower’s pinnacle, the clock

counting its first hours towards us,

when moonlight through long windows of the marble hall

cast pages yet to be written.

Reproduced courtesy of Gillian Clarke and Carcanet Press Ltd.

List of Illustrations

Plates 24, 26, 27, 29, 34, 50, 63 and 71 are also reproduced in the colour plates section between pages 140–141.

Sites listed are referenced with a National Primary Record Number (NPRN). Further information is available through the Royal Commission’s online database www.coflein.gov.uk. This can be searched both cartographically and by NPRN, name and other information categories.

The majority of photographs, most of which are by Iain Wright, are kindly supplied for reproduction by the RCAHMW archives (Crown Copyright). The following are generously donated from various sources:

Cardiff Castle: 11, 12, 13.

Cardiff Council Library Service: 2, 3, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 60.

Cardiff University: Special Collections and Archives: 41, 44, 75.

© Crown Copyright (2014) Visit Wales: 82.

David Hilling: 7, 86.

John B. Hilling: 15, 87.

Photographs 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 14, 20, 54 and 62 are reproduced with the permission of the National Museum of Wales; no. 22 is reproduced with the permission of Media Wales Photos; photograph no. 55 is reproduced with the permission of RIBA Library Drawings and Archive Collection; and photograph no. 85 is reproduced with the permission of Historic England Archive.

Introduction

and Acknowledgements

CARDIFF’S MOST OUTSTANDING architectural phenomenon is its justifiably famous Civic Centre in Cathays Park. Indeed, the Civic Centre’s creation, and subsequent development during the twentieth century to include some of Wales’s principal buildings, is a singular reflection of Cardiff’s importance to the nation and architecturally, at least, validates the town’s status as city and national capital. How the Civic Centre came about is the subject of this book.

In many ways Cardiff was fortunate to end up with such a fine Civic Centre, as the town was not always seen as a progressive place. In fact, it was little more than a backwater until a canal was constructed to link it with its iron-making hinterland. Even then, it was not until the coming of the railways and the large-scale export of coal – the ‘black gold’ that filled the coffers of the coal-masters and the Bute estate – that Cardiff began to mushroom in population, importance and wealth, and so became not only Wales’s premier town but also the world’s greatest coal port. Inevitably, the development brought with it the need for civic institutions and public buildings commensurate with the town’s ambitious aspirations. In time this led to the establishment of a Civic Centre in Cathays Park, which was developed over the course of the twentieth century to become ‘the finest civic centre in the British Isles’, according to John Newman,¹ and one fit for a capital city. Indeed, as a formally planned group of public buildings it is unique in Britain. In order to see anything along similar lines to Cathays Park it would be necessary to go abroad.

The combination of white, Portland stone buildings and green parkland makes Cathays Park unusually attractive – the abundant trees and foliage helping to integrate the various styles of buildings – particularly in spring time when the cherry blossom is out. It is, as I like to think of it, a ‘white city’, largely built through the wealth that was created by the ‘black gold’ that poured from the valleys during the nineteenth century. It is, indeed, an extraordinary assemblage of buildings – in effect, a permanent exhibition – illustrating some of the principal architectural styles and tastes of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century. More than anything, the Civic Centre is a magnificent reminder of the vision of its creators and of the hard-won wealth wrested so painfully from the nearby valleys.

Surprisingly, only one book has been written about this extraordinary enterprise in architecture and town planning, despite the Civic Centre’s renown. This was Edgar Chappell’s Cardiff Civic Centre: A Historical Guide, a slim volume largely written in 1945. Much has happened in the 70 years since the publication of Chappell’s book, and during that period not only has the Civic Centre grown to fill the whole of Cathays Park but also the architectural style of its later buildings has moved further and further away from that of the earlier role models. The time for an update of