Cardiff, god love it, has a bit of a reputation. I spent three years living in the South of England and telling people I went to Cardiff Uni and they would pull a knowing face. When I started telling those same people I was moving back to The Capital of Cymru they pulled offered me a look of slight alarm. Maybe this is more of a comment on people who live in nice villages in Hampshire and all leave the pub in an orderly fashion at 11pm but partly it’s because people think that Cardiff is unnecessarily rowdy.
To be fair a lot of the reputation comes from the fact that Cardiff simply does have a great evening and night time economy. There’s little point arguing with me on this. It’s great for students, it’s great on match days and it’s increasingly great for civilised after work drinks and those precise “trendy wine bars” that the bloke on the Nationwide advert used to rally against (hello Mill Lane). A lot of the reputation is just based on good fun.
A lot of the darker, dare I say ‘rougher’, side of this reputation is also based on what might as well be ancient history. As someone who never so much set foot in Wales until 2009 (take it up with my foolish parents) and didn’t move here until 2010 all I really know about twentieth century Cardiff is that it was pretty different to twenty-first century Cardiff but I’m often told by people that visited back then that things were a little ‘rowdy’.
Personally I am entirely pro a little bit of rowdiness, I’m a fan of sticky floors, and singalongs, and not standing on unnecessary ceremony but even so, there is very clearly a limit to acceptable rowdiness. Pushing past that limit is when you start to get one of these ‘reputations’ fortunately this limit has not been regularly breached in Cardiff for sometime and our new team of Night Marshals have been launched to help make sure things stay that way following the disappointing withdrawal of the Cardiff Council funded taxi marshalling services.
The Night Marshals are about more than ushering disorientated drunks into Dragon Taxis though, they’re about working with venues and the other players involved after dark to make sure things run smoothly and moving Cardiff on another step from a city where things function in the evening economy to a city where things are great. They’re a friendly bunch, if you need their help on a night out in Cardiff flag them down just don’t get too rowdy.