Humph!

There comes a time when your city doesn’t seem your own any more.

The redevelopment of the centre of the city of Cardiff is making it at the moment look uncannily like all those depressing pictures of Beirut looking war torn and picturesquely destroyed. Office walls open to the sky; multi-storey car park floors slanting at crazy angles and jutting out into nowhere; piles of rubble; clouds of dust and Christo-like installations of polythene clad buildings wrapped in the way that he would approve.

All the lively, bright and colourful edifices knocked into a sort of subfusc rubble. Just like multi coloured plasticine which when you played with it as a child transformed itself from a bright rainbow of pigments to a muddy brown. That’s what the centre of Cardiff is at the moment: a place reduced to the unremarkable waiting to emerge from its chrysalis of clay into a . . . well, let’s face it, modern civic architecture which is prompted by easy gain is not going to astonish by its ground breaking, innovative and exciting modernity. It’s far more likely to be the sort of thing which subsumes Cardiff into the mind numbing anonymity of stripped down utility building with the odd cheap flourish. Rather like the Capitol Centre which is an ordinary shopping mall with certain Cardiffian features added to the façade like a piece of cheap scenery.

I don’t hold out many hopes for the look of the New Cardiff. I remember and experience of trying to show some friends a piece of furniture that I thought would go well in my home in a little shop in Leicester shopping centre. The only trouble was I couldn’t find the shop! I was reduced to wandering around the area where the shop was last sighted and plaintively bleating that it was there the previous week! It seemed at first like one of those films where someone’s life has been erased by the government and they have moved someone else in to take the place of the original inhabitant. Just before my mind gave in to a complete belief in the Conspiracy Theory of Everything, I realised that the shop that I was looking for was actually in a shopping centre in Northampton. The centres were so nearly identical that my confusion was just about understandable. The identikit approach to shopping in the centre of cities had taken a very firm hold, and that was during my first year of teaching – some years ago.

Now it’s just the order of the shops which interest the jaded shopper not their range. Standing in the centre of any British city it is possible to recite the shops that you can be certain of finding within a ten minute walk of your position with a 90% degree of accuracy. Cardiff’s last bastion of individuality is found in the arcades (which I always assumed every city had) and the small shops which still seem to make some sort of living. Good luck to them. I only hope that the new development will piggy back on the lucrative establishment of John Lewis and the obligatory money making residential development and encourage the establishment of small stores rather than allowing the bland the national chains to anchor another forgettable shopping experience in the centre of a once distinctive city.

Walking through the strangely restricted centre of Cardiff today I also sensed that the demographic of Cardiff has changed and that my age group are not the commanding presence that I thought it would be. Youth is taking over (and I thought that we late baby boomers were the dominant force in the land) comprising pretty (if over made up for my taste) girls and boys who seem to have brought dressing down to new depths as all of them seem to affect drably scruffy imitations of American grunge as their dress of choice!

All the foregoing are a way of limbering up for my participation in ‘Something Else’ tomorrow: the Grumpy Old Man approach is the only one which works on the programme, which is just as well, as it’s the only approach that I’ve got.

I’ll have to learn to be wide eyed and accepting, I’m sure it will make me a much better person.

And it’ll frighten the horses!