Cardiff city centre is one of the most pleasant of any large city, largely down to it's urban grain of streets and arcades. The arcades accommodate the smaller businesses that keep the place lively, as opposed to the deadening effect of yet another John Lewis. That's not to say that Cardiff doesn't accommodate those behemoths too, but if the department store dies as a type, the multiple arcades could sustain all sorts of activity.
Conventionally, you'd drive into Cardiff on this dual carriageway or that, but we dropped off the A48 at Newport to take the coast road (B4239) via St Brides and Peterstone; the Lighthouse Road. It's not much more than a track crossing the salt marsh and must be the strangest way to enter a city imaginable. These are the badlands, not literally perhaps, but certainly an area yet to be caught up with; an area of rubbish and wildlife and tethered horses, catteries and kennels and shacks. For somebody from Essex, it has charm. Approaching from the east brings you in to the docklands and Rumney; roundabouts, trucks, potholes and anonymous warehouses; lots of them, and ahead, the acrid air of demolition. The road skirts the remains of the big piece of industry (above) in a fog of dirt and suddenly your in a line of filthy traffic moving like some kind of ragged military convoy; signposted to Cardiff Bay.
This I suppose, is regeneration, but you can't be happy about it. The buildings of our 'new' industries are hardly less depressing than those of the old; stock built wrap arounds sporting various attempts at pattern making; as two dimensional as the means of their production; that occasional wonky angle nursing a sterile meeting room; or an atrium of bad chairs. This kind of architecture has now began it's march on the city centre itself, and it's a terribly sad thing. Such buildings are essentially good for nothing. They are as thin as the bank notes and contracts they represent.
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